Understanding your company’s market share can help you gauge its size relative to its competitors and the industry. By monitoring it over time — say once a quarter — investors may see which businesses are growing and which are losing ground in the market and identify potential targets for espionage.
How the market is divided among the various players can tell you a lot about the state of the industry, from the degree of competition to whether several small businesses dominate the market to revealing broader trends like whether consumers are shifting their preferences from one product category to another.