“Apple stock was trending higher early Monday, recovering a bit from last week’s price drop (although shares finished lower Monday),” Kat McKerrow writes for TheStreet. “Monday morning’s boost came courtesy of news out of India that moves the company closer to opening Apple Stores in the country. And the ramifications for profits are huge.”
“Without a doubt, China is an uncertain prospect for Apple. Therefore, the company needs the Indian market to tap into the vast opportunities in Asia,” McKerrow writes. “Monday’s Indian development opens the gate for a closer relationship with Apple. The company will now be allowed to reapply to open its shops in the country. In return, Apple is likely to expand plans for software development and possibly even hardware manufacturing in the company.
McKerrow writes, “India should prove a lucrative partner for Apple. In return, Apple shareholders will have opportunities to profit from this growth.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Hopefully, the approval process moves along quickly now and Apple can begin to rollout company-owned retail stores in India ASAP. Apple should continue to lobby the Indian government to allow quality Apple Certified refurbished iPhones to be sold in the country. That would allow more India citizens to be able to get the world’s most advanced and most secure smartphones.
Once you lock them into the software, it’s over!!!
“Apple should continue to lobby the Indian government to allow quality Apple Certified refurbished iPhones to be sold in the country. That would allow more India citizens to be able to get the world’s most advanced and most secure smartphones.”
Refurbished smartphones are nowhere near the most advanced or secure. It is one thing to dislike the Android platform and hate Google until the day that you die for refusing to pretend as if the Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp. 1994 lawsuit had gone Apple’s way and abstained from appropriating the iOS UX/UI (never mind that since that ruling everyone – INCLUDING APPLE – has been borrowing everyone else’s UX/UI) but the idea that a 3 year old refurbished iPhone is better in any way than a new flagship or even midrange Android is nuts. Especially since that 3 year old refurbished iPhone is only going to get 2 updates max – note that the iPad 2 and iPhone 4/4s will not get iOS 10 – and/or will run them VERY SLOWLY if they do (my iPad 2 got the iOS 9 update and began to run – or more accurately walk – like molasses … I had to reset the thing, delete a ton of apps and also apply subsequent updates just to get it to barely usable).
That’s why the push to sell refurbished iPhones in India isn’t going to work anyway. Apple isn’t a known, aspirational brand in India as it is in Japan – which has been a developed market for decades – or even China. India also has several local manufacturers that have good brand loyalty. So virtually no one in that market is going to buy a used iPhone over a new product made by a local manufacturer that also makes their TVs and stereos and that will still cost less than the refurbished iPhone in many cases! Or they will buy a Samsung, Huawei or Xiaomi device – as they have been doing for years – that costs the same or less.
In places where the Apple brand doesn’t mean a whole lot, getting people to pay more or buy used will be very hard. This was different maybe 5-6 years ago when it was very difficult to get a reliable Android device, especially if it was manufactured by someone other than Samsung, LG, HTC or Motorola. But now that the software has gotten a lot better and the hardware manufacturing is a lot easier thanks to SOC/turnkey/white box designs, most Android phones give decent reliability and performance, even when they cost less than $200.
Take a look at China. A few years ago, there was a frenzy over them among the upper classes because they were fashionable. So Huawei made look-alike devices for half the cost and rode it to being the #3 smartphone maker in the world merely by selling devices that looked like iPhones to those who could not afford them. But today, as iPhones are no longer hip or trendy, both the upper classes and middle/working classes are choosing to local brands. And Xiaomi has slipped from being #3 in the world behind only Samsung and Apple to #3 in China behind Huawei and Oppo, as since the iPhone is no longer trendy, no one needs iPhone look-alikes anymore.
Basically, competing with locally manufactured devices with products that cost 50% more to begin with and then have heavy tariffs imposed on them is going to be a tough uphill climb. Maybe Apple can start manufacturing iPhones in India to avoid the tariffs the way that Xiaomi and several other Chinese manufacturers did, but even there unless Apple is able to get their prices to within maybe $100 of the better local and Chinese phones, they are going to struggle. Sorry, but hype and boosterism only go so far before facts become facts.
@the.bear
You don’t now that market as well as you claim to.
If you think – for a second – there is not an immense want/need for superior and much more affordable Apple products – you just might have lost it….