News

Will short-term thinking eventually sink Apple in India?

In a deviation from its standard policy to make only older iPhones in India, Apple has commenced production of the high-end iPhone XR in that country. Until now, only the iPhone 7 and iPhone 6S were produced there.

A new $1bn investment by the firm’s manufacturing affiliates in India has, however, made it possible to start making the iPhone 11 in India. This means that Apple will no longer be paying a 20% import duty on these devices.

Despite this, Apple executives have told the press that the company won’t be cutting the prices of its smartphones in India.

In fact, the iPhone XR costs 5% more in India than in the US, and that is after a large price cut earlier in 2019. Following the same undeniably greedy approach with the iPhone 11 could significantly hamper Apple’s chances of long-term success in this region.



So far, Apple has sold the iPhone 11 in India for around $920, and this helped to sell out inventories soon after pre-orders launched. However, even at this price, it is still a lot more expensive than the starting price of $699 in the US.

With the device now going to be made in India, Apple has a unique chance to sell it for a cost-related price in that country and gain many new fans.

Local production will get rid of the 20% import tax and make it possible to at least sell the iPhone 11 at closer to what Americans pay for it.

Apple, however, seems to be driven by short-term profit motives. The demand for top-end smartphones in India is booming, with OnePlus dominating this market segment.

By dropping the price of the iPhone 11, Apple might be able to expand its share in the Indian smartphone market above the current 1-2% level and gain long-term buyers, but the company’s leadership appear to be stuck in a ‘let’s make a quick buck’ mindset.

Before you go

After spending over 20 years working with Macs, both old and new, theres a tool I think would be useful to every Mac owner who is experiencing performance issues.

CleanMyMac is highest rated all-round cleaning app for the Mac, it can quickly diagnose and solve a whole plethora of common (but sometimes tedious to fix) issues at the click of a button. It also just happens to resolve many of the issues covered in the speed up section of this site, so Download CleanMyMac to get your Mac back up to speed today.

mac-pc

Tags

About the author

Chris

I've been a passionate evangelist for Apple and the Macintosh throughout my working life, my first love was a Quadra 605 working with a small creative agency in the south of Norfolk UK in the mid 1990's, I later progressed to other roles in other Macintosh dominated industries, first as a Senior graphic designer at a small printing company and then a production manager at Guardian Media Group. As the publishing and printing sector wained I moved into Internet Marketing and in 2006 co-founded blurtit.com which grew to become one the top 200 visited sites in the US (according to Quantcast), at its peak receiving over 15 million visits per month. For the last ten years I have worked as an Affiliate and Consultant to many different business and start ups, my key skill set being online marketing, on page monetisation, landing page optimisation and traffic generation, if you would like to hire me or discuss your current project please reach out to me here.

You can also follow me on: and

Add Comment

Click here to post a comment

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.