“A new survey of smartphone buyers in China has found that the pricing “sweet spot” for Apple’s rumored ‘iPhone 5C’ is $486 — a price higher than the analyst responsible for the poll expected,” Neil Hughes reports for AppleInsider.
“Katy Huberty of Morgan Stanley revealed the results of the AphaWise survey on Tuesday, based on 2,000 Chinese handset users in the nation’s largest cities,” Hughes reports. “The data shows that customers in “tier 1-2 cities” are increasingly planning to purchase more expensive smartphone models, signaling a benefit to both Apple and Samsung.”
Hughes reports, “But if Apple were to introduce a new, lower priced iPhone model, as the company is expected to do, the survey found that it could gain 13 points of smartphone purchase intent share in China. That would push Apple from a 23 percent share to 36 percent among future smartphone buyers, potentially pushing it beyond Samsung which is seen as falling to a 30 percent share in that scenario.”
More info and the survey results for each manufacturer in the full article here.
Price it at $350 and release the Kraken!
I’ll second that. $350 is the sweet spot. $486 is too close to $500 which cannot be considered cheap.
iPhone 4 with 8GB costs as much now (with taxes and fees), so it would make no difference if Apple will release iPhone 5C at the same price.
$299 price will release the Kraken.
I don’t think Apple will be able to keep up with demand as it is, so there’s no point at lowering the price further. That doesn’t make any sense. The production numbers don’t seem very high at all for the first month. Apple only needs to reduce the price if the product doesn’t sell well.
“I don’t think” – there, fixed it for ya.
A survey on a rumored product that (and this is the part that I find hilarious) finds a result higher than the analyst expected.
Gosh, if I were that stupid, I’d be doing my own survey on a rumored tele transportation device and ask people how far they’d like to transport idiotic self seeking their prophecy analysts. I’d be surprise to see how many would transport them out of the solar system, or at least in deep space.
…or how about we just digitize them and pipe them to /dev/null
/nh
Wow that’s deep, deep deep space. I don’t know, keeping them in the machine, they might turn into ghost or combine to form some evil DOS (Demons of Space) entity.
Mind you if you promise to erase the hard drive…
Katy Huberty is one of the worst analysts ever to analyze anything Apple, especially quarterly earnings.
I keep wondering if the iPhone 5C is being planned as a China only model made specifically for China Mobile.
That’s my feeling as well . . . the “C” is for China.
They need a different chip for China Mobile’s network, so either they have to get a chip that covers TD-SCDMA plus the rest of the world, or just build one specific to the Chinese 3G network. Which is less expensive?
I’m looking forward to the release of this product. It will signify the next step in Apple taking away the middle ground in the market. If successful it will restrict our manufacturers to the lower end of the market and suck even more profit out of their hands. The impact on Samsung could be interesting. They may lose critical mass in sales from devices that make up most of their profit.
Potential bloodbath methinks.
At T-Mobile they have iPhone 4S at $549.00 and the iPhone 5 is at $649.00. A price point of $486.00 is too high and it’s still not clear what the specs are for this device. You may get little bang for your dollar.
This price point would only drive people to Apple’s competitors. It’s all a waiting game unless someone accidentally leaves one of these new iPhone at a bar or something.
Apple does not price products by surveys – however comprehensive they are. Do people understand pricing theory?
$486 or 2988rmb is a magic price, that’s about what typical factory worker can earn. It will be interesting to see how Apple will price the iPhone5C, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is 8GB model for that price. There should be iCloud for Chinese users though.
Could this story be the reason the stock is down today?
$486 is a sweet spot. Ha. That’s still way pricey for emerging markets. Try $150/$200.