“Tim Cook needs to be spending a bit more time in India… Data released Friday by Strategy Analytics show that sales in India of iOS-enabled smartphones, meaning iPhones, fell 35 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier. What’s worse, that decline left the U.S. company with just 2.4 percent of a market that grew 19 percent,” Tim Culpan writes for Bloomberg. “While Apple has experienced decreasing sales and shrinking share in many parts of the world, what’s particularly worrying is its inability to capture customers so early in the Indian market’s development.”
“It’s true that the second quarter is often a trough for iPhone sales, because it occupies that dead zone between old and new devices in Apple’s annual release cycle,” Culpan writes. “Yet such a deep plunge indicates just how little loyalty Cook and his design chief Jony Ive have managed to build for its products. Even in China, where Apple slipped to No. 5 during the same period, the company still managed to garner a 6.7 percent share of a much larger market.”
“Apple is renowned for its creative product design,” Culpan writes. “Now it’s time to apply that zeal for innovation to its business model.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s early days yet and Apple just got approved to open Apple Retail Stores in India. Give Cook & Co. a chance to execute the plan before getting too worried.
SEE ALSO:
Apple leases more than 40,000 square feet of office space in Bengaluru, India – July 25, 2016
India clears path for first Apple Retail Store – July 21, 2016
Apple’s Tim Cook samples Bollywood, cricket, in bid to woo India – May 21, 2016
Apple CEO Cook: ‘We are in India for the next thousand years’ – May 20, 2016
Watch Apple CEO Tim Cook at his first cricket game in India – May 19, 2016
Absolute B.S. From a Bloomberg talking head.
Apple inc. will tune their offerings to the Indian market and take it by storm!!
So what you’re saying is that you are happy with a 2.4% market share and a fall in sales of 35% YOY?
I believe Apple can’t do anything about losing market share if they’re not willing to sell $150 smartphones. I don’t really care if Apple can’t improve market share in India. Not if they’re going to ruin their pricing structure trying to compete with a whole bunch of profitless competitors struggling for a tiny piece of the smartphone market. If Indian consumers can’t afford iPhones at current prices then that’s their problem, not Apple’s problem. I’ll bet Mercedes-Benz and BMW only have a small percentage of market share in India and they’re sure not going to slash their prices just to sell more cars, so why should Apple.
Let me give you some valuable information. In 2006, Nokia had a whopping 76% market share in India. Far higher than any other company. Wasn’t that very impressive? Samsung only had a double digit percentage of market share. Please tell me where Nokia is now? Stop drooling over market share because market share alone does not guarantee a successful or profitable company. Nokia’s Indian business model was definitely not sustainable.
India is barely worth Apple’s time and effort trying to sell the middle-class Indian consumer any model iPhone. That country is strictly Android territory.
I’m beginning to hear a lot of (IMHO) manic interest in investing in India with euphoric expectations of growth in productivity and sales. I find all of this to be deeply unrealistic, specifically because such investors are unrealistic about the third world chaos that remains inherent across most of India. A lot of it is based on culture, lack of tangible resources and a dearth of qualified and reliable workers. To leap into the abstract, India isn’t as disciplined a culture as China, IMHO. But please bash at me with alternative POVs. I’m no expert either.
I’m simply mainly attempting to state that India is a profoundly different situation than China. So do your research rather than pretending China’s past performance has ANY relevance to India’s future.
Grammer nazi: …profoundly different situation FROM China.
Would an EDIT ability be so hard to add to WordPress? *grumble*
Hell yeah – they already got our IT jobs, now they’ll be the only ones buying them…
Just get Tim out of this country.
I had to laugh when I read the article, who do they call for support? Outer Mongolia?