![]() The part that matters most may have less to do with India’s consumers than with the country’s growing role as a production hub. The relationship between Apple and India is evolving quickly. “So sharing media and files becomes difficult.” “Most people working under us come from lower-income groups and cannot afford an iPhone,” Mr. She uses it for her Instagram account and other parts of her online social life, but she stays on her Android for work. Kunal Dua, who runs a pharmaceutical business, recently converted his wife, Gagan Deep Kaur, to the iPhone - but only halfway. ![]() “The message that goes out to the peer and society is that, look, this person is not totally third-class,” he said, glancing down at the iPhone tucked into his shirt pocket.Īpple’s formidable ecosystem is bound to spread more slowly in a place where the iPhone remains out of reach for so many. ![]() “It’s simple: For me, it’s a status symbol,” said Subodh Sharma, who earns exactly 25,000 rupees per month working for a construction company. And even for those whom it stretches, it can be a price worth paying. For many millions of wealthy Indians, that is perfectly acceptable. Price hits differently in a country where the top 10 percent income bracket begins at 25,000 rupees, or $304, per month - well under half the cost of a new iPhone. Outposts of Chanel and Van Heusen are nearby. In the Saket mall, called Select CityWalk, a bubble of air-conditioning and chromed shopfronts are across the road from a medieval warren the Apple store is opposite a Krispy Kreme. But the difference between marketing utility goods and luxury products becomes jumbled in the Indian context. Unlike a McDonald’s, for example, Apple’s signature products need to sell for roughly the same price everywhere (or else they would fly around the world, unlocked, on the black market). The Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi sold the most phones in total, and the South Korean giant Samsung, which competes at different price points, had the highest value of sales, according to Counterpoint Research.īut Apple faces a consumer-pricing puzzle in India. Cook himself - and a month later, a new iPad appeared in the mail. The store refused to exchange it, and local service centers weren’t helpful. More recently, he bought an iPad from an Indian outlet, only to discover that its screen was cracked. Some of the most ardent were at the Mumbai opening, screaming their support.Īnd in Delhi are eager customers like Amar Bhasin, 41, whose first cellphone, bought 18 years ago, was a Panasonic. ![]() Yet in India, as in nearly every other part of the world, Apple has its fans. The iPhone is still a rare sight within the ocean of cheaper, and mostly Chinese-branded, Android smartphones that have swept across India over the past decade. But for the past 25 years - marked this week, in fact - Apple has relied solely on third-party sellers to get its products into the hands of Indian consumers. ![]() Cook will travel to New Delhi to open a second store, Apple Saket, at the center of the capital’s biggest mall. Roaring crowds of would-be customers greeted him in Mumbai on Tuesday at a sleek glass-and-timber flatiron of a storefront, called Apple BKC, in the Bandra Kurla Complex. Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, visited India this week to open the company’s first two Apple stores there: The biggest public company in the world is finally opening its first retail outlets in the world’s most populous country. ![]()
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