India is the world’s fastest-growing smartphone market, and every smart-phone maker is looking to grab a bigger piece of this pie. Smack in the centre of this battle is iPhone maker, Apple Inc. The Tim Cook led laptop to watches maker has been in news lately for all the wrong reasons. Central to all its recent problems lies its flagship product from which it generates nearly two-thirds of its revenue – The iPhone.
The recent slump in sales of its iPhones in China has prompted Apple Inc to cut its revenue outlook for the first time in almost two decades. CEO Tim Cook downgraded sales forecasts by 5 billion $, sending shares of the Tech giant tumbling 10% intraday in US stock markets just 3 days after the New Year. Fewer than expected upgrades in the iPhone, weakness in China’s economy (partly due to trade war concerns with the US) and supply constraints were cited as the main reasons for its poor performance.
Even in India, iPhone shipments are estimated to have shrunk by as much as half in 2018 compared to 2017. A prominent Hong Kong-based market research firm projected Apple India’s shipments between 1.6 to 1.7 million units in 2018, down from 3.2 million units in 2017. Apple is finding it hard to compete with rivals in India such as China’s One Plus, which offers devices with better features at half or even one-third of the price.
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