Howard Ward, chief investment officer of growth equities at Gamco Investors discusses Apple’s preparation of a smaller, cheaper iPhone and how they can use that to appeal to emerging markets.
Ward said, “Apple’s reached a point where they can’t ignore the largest segment of the market, which is the emerging markets, where you have billions of people. If they can lock them into the Apple family, invite them in, get them to use Apple products, get them to buy additional products on top of the phone, and then, as their incomes rise, a higher-priced phone.”
Ward speaks on Bloomberg Television’s “Bloomberg Surveillance.”
Direct link to video here.
Related articles:
Bloomberg: Apple developing cheaper, smaller iPhone for 2013 holiday release – January 9, 2013
WSJ: Apple prepping less-expensive iPhone – January 8, 2013
Apple to launch low-cost iPhone with 5-inch display for emerging markets in 2H13, sources say – January 8, 2013
Barclays: Cheaper iPhone for emerging markets ‘key’ for Apple – December 4, 2012
This only works if you can make money as they use it, like google. Apple will have to find a way to do advertising, because there is not any other way to make money off this market segment.
Apple is getting into the world market. This is something they are privy to. To give them advice on obvious is just silly.
Wall Street is not dumb. They’re playing a CON GAME with Apple.
Just don’t trade AAPL with Wall Street’s recommendations or analysis.
It almost seems as though Wall Street is trying to box Apple into a corner and I don’t understand why. This constant talk of how Apple must compete with the low-priced segment of the market or lose everything makes little sense to me when Apple is still making plenty of money. I don’t see how building lower-quality products benefits Wall Street at all. I realize that Apple should try to make affordable products for China due to a huge market to be filled, but that’s as far as it goes. However, Wall Street must have some agenda I’m not aware of to be so adamant about grabbing market share alone.
As a shareholder, I certainly don’t want the company’s share price to keep falling, but I also don’t like the idea of Apple racing to the bottom selling cheap hardware. That’s why I wish Apple would branch out into another line of revenue that doesn’t involve hardware. Move into cloud services or even financial lending which seems like it could be a lucrative business for Apple. Amazon and Google can do cloud services, so why not Apple. It seems selling hardware won’t move Apple’s share price up, anymore.
This punishing of Apple because of not having major market share just doesn’t make any sense. Apple will have a huge a quarter as ever, yet everyday I look, the share price is down while Amazon and Google’s is up. Apple just can’t be doing that badly to keep falling like it is.
China? What about India? Latin America? Don’t sell cheap. There are people with money in every country on Earth.