“Apple Inc on Tuesday rejected allegations from Russia’s state competition watchdog it may have been involved in fixing prices for iPhones, saying resellers set their own prices,” Maria Kiselyova reports for Reuters.
“FAS said it was looking into the idea that Apple had somehow obliged Russian resellers to treat its recommended product prices as mandatory,” Kiselyova reports.
Kiselyova reports, “It said an investigation had shown that retailers had set identical prices and kept them at that level for a certain time period, including for other models.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take:
Resellers set their own prices for the Apple products they sell in Russia and around the world. — Apple Inc. statement
They don’t discount because they don’t have to.
For the sake of argument, let’s say a retailer makes $100 on an iPhone. If they cut the price by $50 they might sell a load more, but they’d need to sell double the amount to make the same as they were making anyway. Add on the fact that they’d have to advertise it to make sure they weren’t just losing money on business they’d get anyway and that increases the number they need to sell. If they cut the price less then it’s probably not that big of an incentive for people to buy them from them anyway. Other than old models that they want to shift before new ones come out the incentive is much lower on products that sell well in the first place. It’s not as if an iPhone will be a loss leader. People aren’t going to buy one and then on a whim spend a load of money on some other technology.