Apple’s smartphone market share has declined by as much as 22% in India. The company continues to drive its India sales by banking on the MacBook sales.
The report published by CyberMedia Research suggests that Apple sold only 585,004 iPhones in India in the last quarter. Compared to the company’s sales record of 753,544, it has declined by good 22%. On the other hand, Apple’s revenue has marginally grown due to the sale of MacBook.
Faisal Kawoosa, head of new initiatives at CMR said, “Apple is continuing to increase its threshold price and that will squeeze the opportunity for Apple in India. iPhone X was a steep jump in iPhone prices, clearly impacting iPhone volumes in India.”
One of the reasons behind the low sales figure is the average price of an iPhone. The average price of iPhones sold in the country has consistently been up in the last one year. April to June quarter last year, the average price of an iPhone sold in India stands at $617, which went further to $756 in October to December, an all-time high was recorded in January to March quarter with $763.
Apple’s iPhones range Rs 20,000 to Rs 1 lakh in India. However, the cheaper iPhones are more than four years old. Since Apple does not support older iPhones with latest software updates, there hasn’t been much uptake on sales of such cheaper iPhones. Even Apple’s CEO Tim Cook acknowledges the low market share in India.
The US-based tech giant holds around 2-3% of overall smartphone sales in the country. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said, “India is the third largest smartphone market in the world. There’s obviously huge opportunities there for us, and we have the extremely low share in that market overall. And so we’re putting a lot of energy there and working with the carriers in that market, and they’re investing enormously on the LTE networks. And the infrastructure has come quite a ways since we began to put a lot of energy in there because of their leadership and so forth.”
Another reason behind the drop in iPhone sales is the increase in Customers duty on phones. The Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has hiked the customs duty on phones to 20% the earlier 15%. Kawoosa CMR said, “Apple’s overall India revenues have been growing but that’s not because of increase in iPhone sales, its purely because they are selling more expensive iPhone including the iPhone X, which costs 40 percent more than previous generation phones.”
Apple has been aggressively pushing its MacBook sales in India. Since July last year, Apple has sold over 4.1 million Macs in India. The interest-free EMIs and heavy discounts on an entry-level MacBook have helped the company grow its MacBook sales. Apple is hoping to push more products and services in the Indian market.
Tim Cooks said, “We continue to put great energy there and try to – our objective over time is to go in there withof our different initiatives retail and everything else. And so we’re working toward those things. It’s a huge market and it’s clear that many people will be moving into the middle-class over time, as we’ve seen in other countries.”