We would now first identify the competitors and then select the biggest ones and calculate market shares through a combination of public data and estimates. Do we have any information on our client’s top competitors?
In administration systems and patient administration the top five players control 66 percent and 65 percent of the market, respectively. The physician support market is much more dispersed, only a quarter of sales can be attributed to the top five players.
However, we are only looking at revenue, but do the companies make money?
We are now looking for patterns to identify strong competitors or extraordinary arrays. By investigating a bit deeper the respective leaders of the two potential markets our client may want to tap in, we find that each player dominates one segment and has relatively small sales, but high growth rates in the other.
We could build the hypothesis that they were, too, looking for further growth outside their core market and therefore branched out.
Excellent candidates remember to always set firm KPIs into relation with the corresponding market. Doing so, the interviewee would figure that our client’s growth is smaller than the overall market growth, which means that our client is slowly losing market share in what they consider their core market.
Also, it seems like HIT Software has entered the administration systems market as well. Our client doesn’t seem to be the only one diversifying.
Additionally, entry barriers for the different systems are not the same. A patient management system shouldn't be too hard to build from the architecture our client is using for its current product. For the physician support system, more complex understanding of physicians’ work is required. We could hypothesize that our client’s company has an advantage over other, purely software focused competitors as its parent organization AtoZ is supplying medical instruments and related services.