This is what all Indians have been waiting for. Till date, all that India had were franchise stores which sold Apple gadgets but none of these stores were retail Apple stores. Now, the wait is finally over. At present, Apple is very close in gaining the clearance they need to open their retail stores in India, as reported by a very familiar source on Bloomberg. According to this source, Apple is planning on submitting their application for retail presence to the Indian government again, since the last time, there were some formatting errors. On the other hand, the source also states that the Indian government is planning to let the application go through without any kind of hassle.
According to the source, the Indian Government is ready to exempt the law which states that any businesses from foreign origin will need to acquire a minimum of 30 % of their manufacturing inputs from local regions. The reason given by the Indian Government to allow Apple to bypass this rule is because they think that Apple provides its customers with state of the art “cutting edge technology”. Due to this reason, previously Apple had problems getting into India, as most of their products were and still are being manufactured in China.
Even with the franchise stores of Apple in India, the market is not too favorable for Apple iPhones or iPads. The main reason behind this is the high pricing of the Apple products, with comparison to Samsung, Intex, Lenovo and other smart phone manufacturing companies. Recent research has shown that Apple has only 2% of the Indian market, which is way behind its competition which is Samsung (with the highest at 26%), Intex (with 10% of the market) and Lenovo (holding 9%).
Last year, in the summer season, Apple had announced that they will be starting the Authorized Mobility Resellers Program in India, and will look forward to opening approximately 500 retail shops in and across 12 cities in the Indian subcontinent. This will be one of the most important steps Apple had made to assure increase in their sales market, which at the present moment, is quite small, even with more than 220 million users of smart phones in India.
