Visualising a mix of companies in a spatial graph (I)

In the previous post I presented a number of companies from different branches of industry, with a revenue between – roughly – 1 and 10 billion euros. Easyjet presented its annual report in GBP and Tesla in USD and a formal conversion is not easy. Earnings come in during the year, against fluctuating exchange rates , but the balance is a kind of photograph at the end of the year. On the other hand we know this is just a blog, illustrating the power of visualisation, using spatial (3D) graphs. So an error of about 5% wouldn’t harm. I like http://www.xe.com/currencycharts to convert the currencies but many others are available. After putting all values to euros using a 2015 average for the exchange-rate, I got this input-file:

Inputfile company-mix

For the people who want to look for themselves, e.g. using the free AnRep3D demo (this was a fully functional version of the 3D-graph generator limited to only one company a time; now the full 3D-graph generator package is free and can be downloaded here) I present the numbers below.

Zalando, 2015, 2960, 120, 1270, 2120

Tesla, 2015, 3690, -810, 830, 5320

Elecnor, 2015, 1880, 66, 7400, 3490

Easyjet, 2015, 6470, 760, 6670, 3100

USG_People, 2015, 2550, 20, 487, 1280

All values are in millions.

I have to admit I didn’t read my own manual (I wrote it myself, I know) and made a stupid mistake as a result (again). Now the parameter-line says: 5, 1, 500, 10, 3 meaning:

• five companies
• one annual value each
• divide all values in data-lines by 500
• put 10% of extra space between the buildings (because USG People is a long title)
• choose font-size 3 for the labels

However, instead of 500 for the third value I entered 0.002. I thought it was a multiplier instead of the divider it actually is! One can imagine what happened: the building were huge, gigantic. Zooming out, the labels were nowhere to be found (of course not – their distance to the buildings was enormous as well).

After a while I realised what had happened and corrected the third value. This time the graph was normal and even very interesting . In the next blogpost I will show and discuss  this graph. Meanwhile, have a look at our website or read the earlier AnRep3D posts.