What do you mean for market performance? 

1- is the market share? or

2- is profits/sales ratio? or

3- is growth of the sales? or

what else?

Established what is the market performance, can one describe competitiveness in the terms you indicated?

If a firm has a high market share, but a low profits/sales ratio is it highly competitive?

If a firm has a high profits/sales ratio, but a low market share is it competitive?

If a firm has both high market share and profits/sales ratio, but a low growth rate, is it competitive?

These are the preliminary questions you are called to respond, before to open a more complex question like yours.

Thank you  Professor Ting Fa Margherita Chang , I will think in your way!!

Competitiveness and market performance are two different things... And there is cause and effect relationships between them...

competitiveness can be described in terms of market performance, when we have big chunk of market share. Several other questions needs to be addressed in this context e.g. what strategies do we use to get the maximum market share? Is it cost leadership strategy or marketing strategy? Cost leadership strategy focuses on product cost reduction through to gain the market share, which can reduce your profitability but marketing strategy focuses on inspection of trends, customer behaviours and so on, which help in taking steps to enhance the market share. So if you want to remain competitive in terms of market performance concentrate on marketing strategies.

One of the measures of competitiveness is the market share. Market performance (if I could guess) could include market share, profitability, and few more marketing attributes like ROI, customer satisfactions, etc.

In that context, you may find the following article interesting. It describes various measures for gaining competitiveness.

Article Towards Balancing Multiple Competitiveness Measures for impr...

Dear Beneberu, according to various authors (including me), competitiveness involves elements of productivity, efficiency, effectiveness and profitability. Barros (2005) wrote that "the competitiveness of a country derives from the performance of its businesses". In this sense, yes you can relate competitiveness with the market performance and vice versa. Good luck with your research and Happy New Year!

I agree with Mohammad: things are diferente. As an example, we may increase competitiveness just giving up some Market share.

Yes, you can describe competitiveness - i.e. the ability to perform in a respective market in relation to the competitors' ability - in terms of market performance. According to my experience, the best measure is the market position. It does not only tell about past performances, it also gives an indication of possible future performances. Number 1 or 2 market position allows an enterprise to spend enough on R&D to keep or even increase its competitive advantage or come up with a disruptive innovation creating a new market.

An other important criteria to assess the competitiveness is the business performance. Key figures to look at include (growth of) sales, new orders, EBIT, net income, profit margin, return on employed capital, earnings per share, market value.

"Soft" criteria: customer satisfaction/ loyalty, brand value, ...