Gulveen Aulakh for The Economic Times:
“Apple has started to export iPhones to some European markets from India, three people aware of the development said, a move that boosts the government’s Make in India plan and is another step in the iconic smartphone company’s efforts of making India an export hub.
“The Cupertino-headquartered company’s contract manufacturer Wistron Corp’s India arm, which first started assembling iPhones in the country back in 2016, has become the first of Apple’s contract makers to export the smartphones from its facility in Bengaluru.
“iPhone 6s and iPhone 7 are being exported in quantities of under 100,000 units a month,” said Neil Shah, research director at Counterpoint Research, citing export data that the firm tracks.”
We know Apple takes India seriously, and while we recently learned iPhone sales there are slow, we’ve also seen reports claiming Apple hopes to open its own retail stores there as soon as this year.
MacDailyNews Take: If Apple can find ways to stimulate consumer demand in India for iPhones, it could create another vibrant market – but it faces huge competition from cheap Android devices.
How can Apple possibly beat low-cost Android smartphones with iPhones? People are out to save money, and think of little beyond that. They’re not going to buy iPhones based on claims of privacy or security. No matter how hard I think about it, I don’t see any way Apple can sell more iPhones in emerging nations. Most consumers are only going to buy smartphones below $200. If Apple wants to make more revenue, they better find some other business apart from selling iPhones.
Microsoft is being predicted to have unlimited growth while Apple has hit a solid wall of no-growth or negative growth. Apple needs to completely rethink its future plans for becoming a growth company.
It’s the reason they are focused on increasing their percentage of revenue from Services; However, iPhones will still be a multi-billion driver in the short term
The problem with the Services business model is that one only sells to you existing customers, which means that if there’s no growth in the customer base, then growth is limited to selling more to the existing customer pool.
And one of the slight-of-hand things that Apple is currently doing with their books is that some of the hardware sales revenue is being internally apportioned over to the Services that are nominally free on that device. As such, they can automatically (and basically invisibility) change that internal “services tax” number on their hardware to create whatever “growth in services” report that they want.
Said everyone ever and yet Apple is a trillion dollar company.
Three benefits to Apple: it allows them to sell new/refurbished ‘cheap’ phones (eg SE), make up for any losses via the App Store Games/iTunes movies and gain a wealth of iOS developers.
This article has nothing to do with India and has everything to do with China, if that makes any sense.
Bottom line there are many people who can’t afford apples tax. It’s just that simple. What good is even thinking about Apples technology is they can’t afford it the phones have gotten too expensive and, they are overpriced and not worth the money
India is not a vibrant place for Apple to be in, it is a cheap market for Android
Everybody said that Chinese customers would never buy iPhones a few years back. The thing is, when a country has a billion people, there are 10 million in the top 1%. The top half has far more members than the population of North America.
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