Business English Vocabulary » Podcast Feed

Dividend - Certain stocks pay what is called a “dividend” to their investors. Each company can decide whether or not they want to pay a dividend to their shareholders or to re-invest the money back into the company to grow it more. Many large companies that earn a lot of money pay a dividend to their investors. A lot of small but growing companies do not pay dividends. Sometimes dividends are paid each month and sometimes they are paid every 3 months. If you own a dividend paying stock, the money will just go automatically into your bank account every time they pay the dividend.

Market share - A company’s “market share” is the percentage of a certain market a company has.  In the soft drink industry for example, Coke and Pepsi have the biggest market shares, and other companies have a much smaller market share. For internet search, Google has the largest market share in the USA but Baidu has the largest market share in China.

Monopoly - A monopoly is when a company is the only company in the field and has little or no competition.  If a company is in this situation they can charge unusually high prices for their products.  Governments often make laws to try to prevent companies from having a monopoly.

Viral Marketing - A virus is a type of disease that spreads around a population.  Viral marketing is basically making some kind of cool or interesting product that people want to tell their friends about.  Even though this isn’t a real virus, it kind of spreads like a virus from one person to another. Google and Facebook were great viral marketing success stories.  Both of these websites didn’t really need to spend much on advertising at the beginning, because so many people thought the product was cool and they wanted to tell their friends about it.

Preditory Pricing - Preditory pricing is when you sell something at a very low price to make your competitors want to leave the market or feel afraid to enter the market. Companies are always looking for ways to have as little competition as possible.  If a company has a lot of money, they might use some predatory pricing strategies to get all of the weaker companies out of the market.  Once most of the companies have left the market, the company who was doing the predatory pricing might raise their prices again so they can earn more money.