iPhone price in India : 10K, 15K or 21K?
What’s the real price of iPhone in India? While the initial frenzy of $199, i.e. Rs. 8,000/ has settled down, it’s time to look at the price component of iPhone in US.
As per iSuppli report:
* Manufacturing cost of new iPhone is $173 (excluding the cost of developing software, which will be amortized in the long run) - drop of $53 from the earlier version.
* iPhone is sold to operators for $300+ (under the new deal with AT&T, Apple no longer receives a portion of the carrier’s revenue from service subscriptions)
* The current price of $199 is the subsidized price with operators taking a hit of ~$300
US operators have all the reason to take the ~$300 hit since the inbuilt core of iPhone will help them maximize their revenue/ARPU - i.e. 3G support will help them upsell lot of data related services.
And what about iPhone’s price in India?
Given that ARPU is sliding downwards, Indian operators do not have any incentive to bring down the price of iPhone.
Vodafone and Airtel are unwilling to talk about the price they will offer the iPhone at, but Bharti Airtel CEO Manoj Kohli told TOI there is no question of subsidising the handset in India. “US operators are able to subsidise handsets because they can make up for that with their call charges. They charge rates like 25 cents a minute. In India, the charge is 1.5 to 2 cents a minute,” Kohli said. [ET]
Essentially that means iPhone could be priced somewhere around $499, i.e. 21K?
To add to the context, India is not the most important market for Apple - 50% of Indian handsets are still on ULCH (i.e. ultra low cost handsets) and 3G infrastructure is a distant reality.
If Nokia plays it’’s cards well and get Internet/data activity on ULCH, they can penetrate the BoP segment and secure their market share.
To add colors to the story, iPhone’s nearest competitor, N95 is priced @ Rs. 25K, N96@ Rs. 36K and HTC’s Touch Diamond @ Rs. 27K.
How much are you willing to pay for iPhone, knowing the fact that you can’t avail the benefits of much hyped feature, i.e.3G support.
Take the poll. (poll is closed now- check out the poll results here)
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