can somebody explain a term for me?

Shanannigan

i'm reading a comreg report for college, the most recent one on the communications market, i'm focussing particularly on the mobile phone market. i came across the term "penetration" and while i have a general idea what this means in reference to the mobile phone market i was wondering if anybody could give me a proper definition.

MarkR

In this context it would be like market share I believe.

forbairt

This reminds me of something funny I said to someone a month or two back ...

wikipedia ... the only search engine I feel comfortable putting the term mobile phone penetration into ...

Anyways ...

I could be wrong but market share would be what kinda market share vodafone have ... and that would be 45.2% ... penetration within the irish market would be 114% ... which means how many phones are there per person ... so there are 1.14 phones per person in ireland ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_network_operators_of_Europe#Republic_of_Ireland

Steve J

Yes, it would be share of the market

antoinolachtnai

It's what forbairt says.

Maglight

I take penetration to mean something slightly different than market share. Penetration refers to the population as a whole, whereas market share refers to the current market as defined by people who currently use the product. So in a growing market, companies should target both to increase their share of the current market (ie market share) but also increase the overall size of the market by getting more new users (penetration)

failsafe

Penetration is usually used for emerging markets (Ireland in the 90's, and now eastern europe, china, india etc.)

A more apt term for comreg to use, which might clear up the confusion, could be "saturation"

cazzy

Penetration in pricing is when a product is sold to have full take up (ie to have the market penetrated with the product)

A product may be sold cheap to have full penetration.

Penneys shop focus on product penetration (ie their product is cheap to have full take up and profit through high sales whereas Brown Thomas differentiate on quality and brand and use differentiated pricing)

I think some of the posters above may be getting mixed up with market saturation.
Penetration was coined by Ansoff and used in his model (Ansoffs Growth Model) to describe how companies can grow their market share. (Theres 4 ways penetration being one way)
In what context was the word used in your report ?


Market penetration is one of the four growth strategies as defined by Ansoff. Market penetration occurs when a company enters/penetrates a market with current products. The best way to achieve this is by gaining competitors' customers (part of their market share). Other ways include attracting non-users of your product or convincing current clients to use more of your product/service (by advertising etc).

antoinolachtnai

Comreg doesn't mean it in the Ansoff sense. Penetration is the ratio of active mobile phones to the population. See Google (http://www.google.ie/search?hl=en&safe=off&rlz=1B2DVFC_enIE219IE219&q=+mobile+penetration&btnG=Search&meta=) for many uses with this sense.

failsafe

cazzy wrote: »

I think some of the posters above may be getting mixed up with market saturation.

TBH, I think it's ComReg that's making that mix up, I was just explaining that saturation is what their definition of penetration means!