iPhone. Apple began to publicly confirm exactly what everyone knows, that the prices of its phones are much too high for what fans are willing to pay, so it announced that an international round of price reductions is coming. Tim Cook, the president of Apple, announced last night that Apple will offer price reductions in countries where the exchange rate fluctuates a lot, so that its phones end up being much more expensive than they should be.
iPhone. Apple will set the prices of its phones, not based on the exchange rate against the dollar, but based on the local currency, and this means that in some countries the prices of the phones would be reduced, but it is not clear by how much. It is not known which will be the countries where the iPhone phones will have lower prices set by Apple, but an example was given for Turkey, where the exchange rate fluctuations erased 700 million dollars from Apple's annual receipts.
Apple will reduce iPhone prices in countries where there are problems with sales
iPhone. It's hard to say if there will be price adjustments including in Romania, but even if there were, I can't imagine that prices could drop by more than 100 LEI, this being a maximum value we can expect. On the other hand, those from Apple announce that they will also try to solve the problem of the disappearance of subsidies in certain countries, iPhone prices becoming much too high for customers without the subsidies granted by the operators.
When you look at foreign currencies and then particularly those markets that weakened over the last year those (iPhone price) increases were obviously more. And so as we've gotten into January and assessed the macroeconomic condition in some of those markets we've decided to go back to more commensurate with what our local prices were a year ago in hopes of helping the sales in those areas.
iPhone. On the other hand, Tim Cook also admitted that people keep their phones for longer periods of time than in the past, and it's normal, since you pay over 1200 euros per phone. All in all, the people from Apple are now saying what everyone knew, that iPhones are too expensive, although they partially recognize the problem, without blaming them, but also that people are buying new phones less often, which affects the smartphone industry globally.
