Apple for the day

Jim Edwards has a Business Insider article about Apple:

Apple CEO Tim Cook just gave his most detailed commentary yet on the effect the high price of the iPhone has on the device's declining sales. In an interview with NDTV's Vikram Chandra in India, Cook was asked a tough question about whether the iPhone, which costs about six hundred dollars in the US, but is more expensive almost everywhere else in the world, was really worth its price.
iPhone sales fell sixteen percent in the most recent quarter, and the iPhone is losing market share to Android almost everywhere. Analysts believe iPhone sales will continue to decline all through this year.
Cook replied that he did think the iPhone might be priced too high in India, and he said the company would consider lowering the price: "I recognize that prices are high. We want to do things that lower that over time to the degree that we can."
That is a significant acknowledgement. Apple's mantra has been that the company makes the best products and doesn't want to compete on price. That is how Apple maintains its enormous profit margins. So any notion that Cook may try other strategies that include lowered prices, especially in a market the size of India, would be important.
Previously, Cook only hinted in a vague way, back in January of 2016, that the high price of the iPhone was hurting the device's sales.
While the US price of the iPhone is about $600, currency fluctuations and local taxes increase the price to the equivalent of $931 in Brazil, $784 in India, and $671 in the UK. That makes the iPhone leagues more expensive than Android models whose functionality is similar to that of the iPhone. Here's a comparison chart from Deutsche Bank:

Chandra's question really summed up Apple's problem in a nutshell: not only is the price high, but a lot of Apple services, like iBooks, don't actually work in India. That makes the iPhone look like a bad deal. Here's the crucial part of the NDTV interview:

Chandra: It's expensive. Even in dollar terms it's expensive, because you have taxes in India and then you don't necessarily have all the functionality that you would in the US. So you've got an iPhone here which is more expensive than it is in the US, with less functionality than you would have in the US, and in a country where purchasing power is a fraction of what it is in the US.

Cook: The challenge there is the duties and the taxes and the sort of compounding of those, it takes a price and it makes it very high. Our profitability in is less in India, materially less. But still I recognise that prices are high. We want to do things that lower that over time to the degree that we can, so we're looking at a number of different things. What we would not do is lower our quality bar.
Cook later went on to repeat Apple's historical position, which is: "We're only going to make a product that we think is a great product. And that means we are not going to compete in some of the other price bands." But then he went back and repeated his statement that iPhone prices could come down:
Cook: But I want the consumer in India to be able to buy at a price that looks like the US price. That would be my objective. And I want the user to have all the services.
That statement would suggest that Cook wants to see a twenty-four percent cut to the average price of the iPhone in India.
Clearly, none of this is a cast-iron guarantee that Apple will start competing on price. Cook was playing to an Indian audience, which doesn't want to hear why it's okay that Indians pay a thirty percent premium for their phones compared with Americans.
Nonetheless, it shows that Cook is aware of one of the key problems holding the iPhone back: the smartphone market is no longer growing, and Apple has already fully captured the high end of the market. Yet Apple needs to grow, and it's difficult to see where that growth will come from if a billion people in Asia can't afford the product.
Here is the entire interview:

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