TRADRILL / GLOSSARY / TRANSMISSION CHAINS
What Is a Supply-Chain Hop?
Category: Transmission chainsChinese: 供应链跳
Short definition
A supply-chain hop is one link in a transmission chain asserting that the source company supplies a part, material or service to the target company, backed by a citation and sized by how much of the supplier's revenue that relationship represents.
What it means
Of the four relationship types a chain may use — supply chain, revenue exposure, competitor, partnership — the supply-chain hop is the most concrete: one company sells something to another, and the event upstream changes how much. It is the hop most often supported by primary documents (a filing that names a customer, a customer-concentration table, a supply agreement announcement) and therefore the one most often on the disclosed track.
Direction matters. The hop runs from supplier to customer, but the exposure being measured is usually the supplier's: what share of its revenue depends on the customer or on the component in question. A customer that is 40% of a supplier's revenue and a supplier that is 0.5% of a customer's cost of goods are the same relationship seen from two ends, and a chain must say which end it is sizing.
The common error is inferring a supply relationship from co-mention. Two companies appearing in the same article, or one company's part appearing in a teardown, is evidence of a relationship at some scale — not evidence of the scale. A supply-chain hop needs a number, and the number needs a document.
What qualifies as evidence for this hop
A supply-chain hop stands on documents of this kind:
- A filing or annual report naming the customer or the concentration of revenue from top customers.
- A supply agreement, purchase order or capacity reservation announced by either party.
- A product teardown or bill-of-materials analysis, marked as a third-party estimate rather than a disclosure.
- A basis line that states the period and the denominator behind the percentage.
- A statement of which end of the relationship the magnitude belongs to.
- An as-of date, because supplier lists change with every product cycle.
Sizing a supply-chain hop
The routine that turns a co-mention into a hop, or discards it:
- 1.Find the primary document that names the relationship; if only a secondary report exists, mark the hop estimated.
- 2.Identify the denominator: total revenue of the supplier for the period the document covers.
- 3.Compute the share; if the document gives only a range or a rank ("top five customers"), record the bound, not a midpoint.
- 4.Write the quote you relied on beside the number, and the date the document speaks for.
- 5.State what the evidence does not show — a customer relationship does not show that the event upstream changes the volume.
Frequently asked questions
How is a supply-chain hop different from revenue exposure?
Supply chain names a specific counterparty: A supplies B. Revenue exposure sizes a company's dependence on a category or theme (a product line, a market segment) without naming a single counterparty. Many chains use both: a revenue-exposure hop to size the segment, then supply-chain hops to name who is in it.
Can a supply-chain hop be estimated rather than disclosed?
Yes, and it is labelled as such. Teardown-based shares, analyst reconstructions and inferences from capacity figures are estimates; the hop keeps its assumptions in the basis line and the reader sees an estimated-track magnitude.
What if the customer is not named in the filing?
Then the hop is at best estimated and may not be worth drawing at all. Filings that say "a major customer" without a name do not establish a supply relationship with any particular company; a chain that fills the name in from rumour has left the method.
Related terms & reading
Related terms: Transmission chain · Revenue exposure · Magnitude two-track
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