Apple was seen scheming to beat Samsung and other Android device manufacturers with the help of EMI plans and a wider market presence in India. These moves seemed to have paid off initially, with IDC reporting that the company scooped the second place in smartphone revenues in the last quarter of 2012.
Now word is out that the spell was broken and iPhone sales saw a drop in the first three months of 2013. Manasi Yadav of IDC India notes that the handset’s popularity slumped after the October to December period in 2012, says The Economic Times. January, February and March of this year witnessed Apple selling 120,000 iPhone units. It’s a big stumble from the 230,000 sales figures reported in the three closing months of 2012.
The truth is that people like choice. Is the company’s ‘One phone a year’ policy doing damage to the brand’s attractiveness? One iPhone every twelve months laid against other manufacturers’ abundant supply of new handsets every few weeks may not hit hard enough. Apart from Samsung, Micromax and a few other smaller companies have also been delivering products (some with cheap thrills) regularly. And that too, at tags which should keep the price-sensitive Indian market satisfied.
It may also be safe to conclude that frequently putting new devices on the shelf could aid brand recall for companies which don’t have a long-standing reputation to back them. So why has the Apple iPhone lost its sheen in the third largest market for smartphones? If price was the only concern, the EMI schemes should have had it covered.
