They have boots on the ground.
I hope Morgan Stanley will forgive me for posting the video below, taken from a note sent to clients Friday morning.
There's been a lot of naysaying in New York about iPhone's—and Apple's—prospects in India. Parag Gupta and Jerry Liu, two Morgan Stanley analysts who know the territory, think different.
Among their bullet points:
- India is adding three new Internet users every second, which puts it roughly where China was seven years ago.
- Smartphone penetration on the subcontinent is on track to hit 60% by 2020, up from 32% today
- In a Morgan Stanley survey, Indian buyers said they were willing to spend more ($180 up from $132) on their next smartphones, which benefits Apple and Samsung
"Similar to China," says Liu, "we expect Apple and Samsung to dominate at the high end and garner most of the profit pool in India over time."
Here's Morgan Stanley's chart showing Apple doubling market share for $400+ smartphones
Here's the Morgan Stanley video:
The over-riding factor that will affect how quickly India can add to Apple iPhone sales is the time it will take for India to buildout a 4G network. That is of course very dependent on their economy, not just their desire to do it. I happen to believe it will be a slow process taking years.
24% of company capital invested in the 4G network and spectrum auctions, from a first scanning of the available info. Interesting note that they are averaging 18GB _per mobile user_ during the 4G rollout trials, which if correct is stupendous.
The same conglomerate is also expanding a retail storefront footprint in India, no idea whether those stores will be selling smartphones, but they have self-branded smartphones with India market optimized technical specs.
Philip, is there a deeper story here?
http://www.ril.com/OurBusinesses/Jio.aspx
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Reliance-Jio-Half-a-million-users-18GB-average-monthly-data-use/articleshow/51945761.cms
http://mashable.com/2016/09/06/reliance-jio-launch-queue/#eXcHWg0RrPqP
“Reliance is offering users free voice calls and 4GB of data usage every day till Dec. 31, 2016. The company is also offering customers access to its on-demand live TV viewing service, music and movies streaming, magazine app, cloud storage among other homegrown services till the end of next year…”