Bloomberg:
In Bengaluru’s busy Madiwala neighborhood, a Poorvika Mobile World shop is plastered with posters for Samsung and Xiaomi and filled with inexpensive phones from brands like China’s Oppo and Vivo. Off to one side is a forlorn display stand with the iPhone 6, 6s, and X, the latter sitting upside down. Despite a zero-interest payment plan and cash-back incentives, Apple Inc. is lucky if the iPhones account for 25 of the 1,000 smartphones the store sells each month, says manager Nagaraja B.C., who goes by one name. “The average budget of a shopper is about 10,000 rupees,” he says, roughly $150. The iPhone SE, the cheapest Apple model, costs almost twice that. For $100, shoppers can get a Xiaomi Redmi 5A with a bigger battery, better camera, and greater storage capacity.
And:
For years, Indian consumers have complained that Siri can’t process their requests in local languages, they have no access to Apple Pay, and Apple Maps can’t give them turn-by-turn directions or identify points of interest.
Apple has long been the high-priced spread, with a focus on tapping the moneyed crowd. The first quote above implies that the pricey iPhone is not a financial match for this particular market. The second quote seems more a result of that mismatch.
Once Apple figures out how to build product that fits this market, once they see the potential revenue here, Apple will no doubt apply their resources to solve the localization problem.
It may just be that India doesn’t have large enough middle class to matter to Apple at this point. China, after all, is not that much bigger but has a much larger middle class (I’m using ‘middle class’ to mean people who are roughly that socioeconomic level in US terms) and they do fine there as far as I know.
This is no different than saying “Android has huge market share in Country X” and finding out that most of the Android phones aren’t the upper tier ones but the cheap, entry level phones that can be sold for $50-150. Some markets just don’t have the concentration of wealth to support higher prices, premium products.
Apple is far from the dominant player in Europe as well. Yet here there are enough rich people to buy their products. The problem is that in many cases Apple stuff works amazingly well in the US and English speaking countries but its internationalisation is way behind and many of the features people take for granted in the US are not available here. Yet we pay more for the same phones. Just a stupid example … predictive text input keyboard does not work in Dutch … how hard would it be to fix that. Other examples: Siri is terrible, maps is terrible (yelp sucks in Europe), no Apple Pay, No visual voicemail, Books is a total mess in multilingual countries, No video rentals (I won’t hold my breath for the upcoming video streaming service) … the list keeps on growing every year.
Noteworthy to me — That the store bothers to carry the X with the rest of the facts in the summary.
That means there are Apple customers in the neighborhood, and they are the profitable customers the store really wants. Despite all the localization problems.