“Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to boycott American-made electronics, such as those made by Apple Inc., and offered a rather less well-known alternative to the iPhone,” Nate Lanxon reports for Bloomberg. “‘In Turkey we have Vestel Venus,’ he said on Tuesday, referring to a series of smartphones that retail in Turkey for between about 650 lira ($99) and 2,500 lira, and are manufactured by Vestel Elektronik Sanayi ve Ticaret AS. ”
“A challenge for Vestel will be the fact that its devices are built using numerous American-developed components, including chips manufactured by Qualcomm Inc., a major semiconductor company based in San Diego, California, and touchscreen glass created by New York-based Corning Inc.,” Lanxon reports. “Alternatives to these components exist, and Vestel uses some of them — in a number of its phones, for example, chips designed by Taiwan’s MediaTek Inc. are used instead of those made by Qualcomm. Harder to replace is the Android operating system, developed by Alphabet Inc.’s Google, which in addition to powering Vestel’s phones also underpin the majority of mobile phones sold worldwide.”
“It’s safe to say that Vestel’s Venus phones — which look a lot like an early iPhone — aren’t among Apple’s global rivals,” Lanxon reports. “The product line had a home-market share of 6-7 percent at the end of 2016, according to analysts at HalkInvest. Apple sold over 200 million iPhones in 2017, almost three-times Turkey’s population.”
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MacDailyNews Take: Erdogan is tilting at windmills.
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Turkish president calls for iPhone boycott amid U.S. tensions – September 14, 2018