Before, the Top 10 Competitors section would automatically populate, but now it gives a message stating: "No competitors found for your request" . I was informed that I have to select the country first, and then I would get the competitors for that country.

This is not intuitive. Either make a default country selection based on the user, or update the message to inform the user that they need to select the country first. It also is glaring that these two UI elements are not close to each other on the page but yet one relies on the other, which contributes to the "not intuitive" problem.