Forecasting Market Share on Laptop Brands for University Students Using Markov Chain

ABSTRACT Electrical devices market occupies a significantly position in Malaysia, especially the higher consumer's demand towards laptop market. In fact, laptop is an efficient and useful tool that contributes to students in university. Normally, students use laptop in communication, assessing information from the Internet and doing assignments. In order to grasp the business opportunities, it is important to the marketers to understand the market trend so as their marketing strategic can be planned. In this study, market share, which is a portion of targeted customers in using laptop, is identified and forecasted. The probabilities of the state of nature, which are belonging to the brands of laptop, are transformed into the transition matrix. This transition matrix presents the feature of the Markov chain, where the next state of the system depends only on the present state of the system. During the calculation procedure, the state probabilities are obtained and these probability values are changed over the time. When the steady state is achieved after a certain period, the state probabilities that are in steady state would show the chances of the customer loyalty and the market trend. In conclusion, the result of this study enables laptop marketers to make a more precise decision on improving their business.