Mobile Phones Market Trends in the Mexican Undergraduate Students Segment: A Markov Chain Model Application

Abstract

Mexican mobile phone industry has been rapidly changing and growing in the last years due to the dynamic competition among mobile phone operators and mobile phone manufacturers. In this article, it is presented a market share tendency analysis of the main mobile phone operators and manufacturers inside Mexico City undergraduate students market. For the analysis it was taken a sample size of 518 individuals from nine different universities. The market share tendency analysis is based on the application of the Markov Chains model in the complete segment and in different sub segments. The results of this analysis suggest that operators and mobile phone manufacturers behave differently from each other; in competitive structure as well as in speed of customer change inside each market. It is shown that changes between mobile phone brands are more dramatic than changes between mobile phone operators. As well, both industries have different time periods to reach equilibrium between market shares. In this article, also different statements are exposed in order to allow the design of marketing strategies that can modify market shares tendencies for both industries.