Monday, April 21, 2008

Apple and the Italian mobile market

As anticipated in this blog few months ago, Apple was forced to change its strategy so to enter the Italian mobile market, which is one of the biggest and most profitable in the world.

The change of strategy reflects the way this market is moving:

- lot of attention on the newest and trendiest device
- an attitude to shift from one operator to another
- a market where operators play a really big role (two big operators, Tim and Vodafone, a medium one, H3G)
- poor wifi availability

The answer is an agreement based on exclusive distribution via Tim for 6 months, no revenue sharing, UMTS based device (44% UMTS share in Italy vs 20% France and 18% UK).

The other key fact is a consideration about device and software.
Motorola is going bankruptcy even if its Razr is the best sold device ever. Why? Because Motorola was not able to deliver contents (software, platform, etc) and get eventually caught in the price trap of the mobile market.
Apple has one chance to avoid this trap: its browser, Safari.
In US 70% of the internet access via mobile comes through Safari.

Selling more devices is the way to remain on top for more advanced market, as Italy.

2 comments:

MacTrader said...

I understand the need for market capitalization but I want a new iPhone and I don't live in Italy. What kind of specs does the 3G have?

gianandrea said...

2G networks were built mainly for voice data and slow transmission. 3G is for faster connection and downloading. It is a key factor to support web surfing in countries where wi-fi is not developed yet.
for more tech specification, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G