“While supply side news stunned Wall Street showing stronger demand for the iPhone 7 than anyone anticpated, we just caught wind of two other pieces of news: one is great news, the other could be catastrophic,” Ophir Gottlieb writes for Capital Market Laboratories. “First, the good, then the bad.”
Talks between India’s Finance Ministry and the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) have begun and the option of letting Apple open stores without sourcing requirements in the initial years has been floated. The Indian government is expected to allow the tech giant to open its own retail stores in the country without any sourcing requirement for two to three years, according to the Times of India.
“That’s the great news,” Gottlieb writes. “But, Apple Inc. also just received catastrophic news too, from a totally different place. ”
[A] new patent cross-licensing agreement with Microsoft now gives Xiaomi access to about 1,500 of Microsoft’s patents. In exchange, Xiaomi has agreed in exchange to install Microsoft’s Office and Skype software on all the smartphones and tablets it sells. About 90 percent of the 70 million smartphones that Xiaomi built last year were sold in China. UK-based analyst Sameer Singh told Reuters, “This deal might just give them enough of a patent trove to move to Western markets.” – Breitbart
“While the bearish view of this outcome is pretty obvious, it turns out this could be a non-issue,” Gottlieb writes. “The U.S. consumer is no different and there is very little evidence that even if Xiomi makes it to the U.S. that anyone will be interested.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “Stunning?” Sounds like Ophir has a flair for the hyperbolic headline. Hint: If it doesn’t stun, it ain’t stunning.
So, yet another pretend iPhone (this one even more superficially imitative than most) that’s stuck running the fragmented, rarely-updated-hence-insecure Android OS? Yawn.
Xiaomi only gets away with their slavish copying of Apple products because the Chinese courts wouldn’t know trade dress infringement if it drove over them in a tank in the middle of Tiananmen Square.
As for India, get ready, here comes Apple!
SEE ALSO:
Apple loses Chinese smartphone crown to iPhone imitator Xiaomi – August 3, 2015
Don’t be silly, Xiaomi is no threat to Apple – January 19, 2015
Chinese Xiaomi copycat hit with patent infringement lawsuits, sales bans – December 23, 2014