Thread: Nokia CEO Blames Salesmen For Windows Phone Struggles
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kureyon is offline kureyon
2012-02-09 , 10:51
Posts: 992 | Thanked: 738 times | Joined on Jun 2010 @ Low Earth Orbit
#341
Originally Posted by gerbick View Post
How can you say that I'm mixing up sales figures and market share? They're one in the same. You sell more - and there's only so many humans on the planet- then you will have more market share.

Explain the fallacy in that. Where's the mistake in that?
Easy.
  • sales figures are absolute numbers
  • market share is a percentage
  • total size of market (for purposes of calculating market share) is not the same as the potential size of the market (ie your reference to "there's only so many humans on the planet")
Simple hypothetical example:

Assuming there are only 2 widget manufacturers, ACorp and NCorp.

Last year, they each sold 100 million widgets. So out of a market size of 200 million widgets they each have a 50% share.

This year, the economy is better and people are buying more widgets and there's a demand for 500 million widgets. However because the CEO of NCorp had been making disparaging remarks about its own widgets they have discouraged some potential customers from buying their widgets. These customers instead buy from ACorp. So this year ACorp had their best ever year yet and sold 300 million widgets. NCorp also had their best ever year yet and sold 200 million widgets - twice as much as last year, unfortunately their market share had also dropped from 50% to 40%.