“Apple has succeeded in committing European mobile phone operators that want exclusively to sell its new iPhone to share parts of their revenues with the technology group,” Astrid Maier and Volker Müller report for The Financial Times.
“The contract, which was signed by three European mobile operators in recent days, requires that the operators hand over to Apple 10% of the revenues made from calls and data transfers by customers over iPhones,” Maier and Müller report.
“The contract was signed by T-Mobile of Germany, Orange of France and O2 in the UK,” Maier and Müller report. “The operators are set officially to announce the partnerships at the IFA trade fair in Berlin at the end of August.”
“In the US, AT&T has negotiated a two-year contract with Apple, which is understood to be unusually heavily weighted in favor of Apple,” Maier and Müller report.
“‘These are not negotiations among equals. Apple clearly had the upper hand,’ one industry expert told FT Deutschland,” Maier and Müller report.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Leo” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Note: Apple’s iPhone plans called for a U.S.-first launch, followed by a UK-France-Germany launch, with other European countries to follow by end of 2007, and Asia sometime in 2008.
For what it’s worth – and it might give some indication of where Apple’s initial interests lie – After the initial U.S. launch, Apple launched their iTunes Store in Europe first in the UK, France and Germany in June 2004. Four months later, in October 2004, Apple launched iTunes Store in Austria, Belgium, Finland, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain (Canada followed two months later in December 2004). Five months after that, in May 2005, came Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland (Japan followed in August and Australia in October 2005 and New Zealand in December 2006). Of course, keep in mind that music licensing agreements affected and/or dictated the iTunes Store launch dates.
