Often students struggle on how to start an assignment which asks them about entering a new market with a product of their choice. Which product and what country to invest in? How can they see what the market volume is and whether it is worth entering a country where the market has a healthy forecast? Help is at hand. Fortunately, Euromonitor has the answer to these questions and much more, particularly as I have been exploring the wizardry Dashboard feature (below) on the database which provides the researcher with useful market size and insightful forecast, meaning they can learn if a market has potential or has reached saturation point. The following six-step instructions is a method to easily answer an international business assignment within a few well-spent minutes.
Purely hypothetically if I am interested in selling smartphones in Vietnam via shopping outlets does this idea have any business potential. Simply, is it worth investing in?
1. Firstly, go to library.lincoln.ac.uk > resources > E > Euromonitor.
2. On the homepage go to Choose Industry > Consumer Electronics > Dashboard > GO.
3. Table 1 below shows the market size of consumer electronics (dark blue showing the greatest)
Table 1: Consumer Electronics Dashboard (Market Size)
4. This map can be changed to forecast (on the top left-hand side) to show forecast, to find out whether a growth area like India or far-eastern Asia is worth investing in, and immediately we can see the darker blue areas are worth investigating further.
Table 2: Consumer Electronics (Forecast Growth)
5. If we select Channel View from the tabs we can appreciate that some of far-eastern Asia sells a double-figure growth in consumer electronics using store-based retailing.
Table 3: Store-Based Retailing (Historic Growth)
6. Choose category > Portable Consumer Appliances > Mobile Phones. We can see that from Table 4 the paler blue areas might be worth investigating, like Vietnam. We can hover our mouse over an area and break the data into smaller chunks.
Table 4: Mobile Phones (market size)
Table 5: Mobile Phones (forecast growth)
From Table 5 we can see that consumer electronics are a boom area in Vietnam and selling mobile phones via store-based retailing is worth investing in. Indeed, by hovering the mouse over the country we can see that mobile phones sales are predicted to grow an amazing 13.7%. From these simple steps we can see that it is possible not only to find an idea for an assignment using Euromonitor but we are able to plan the structure too. We can also drill down further into whether we are selling Smartphones, or another mobile phone product. Market wizardry in a snapshot!