• Iphone at Rs. 31000 in India ! Wonder who will buy ?

    by Arun Prabhudesai on August 21, 2008 |

    10 comments

    Okay, tomorrow is August 22nd and much hyped Iphone will come in consumers hand, but at what price – 31,000 rupees !

    Now thats ridiculous – Just cant think of paying that kind of sum, even if it is Iphone. And mind you, Iphone 3g is still highly buggy, even after the latest OS upgrade – and 3G services in India are long way ahead. So the only reason one will buy is for showing off !

    But Industry experts of other opinion, they say bookings and pre-launch interest suggest that Airtel and Vodafone combined would be able to sell over 100,000 phones in the next 12 months. Companies like Vodafone, which opened bookings for the phones in July, have already received booking requests of over 10,000 phones.

    I bet less than 5% will actually go for it !

    BTW…and interesting fact is Iphone is priced most expensively of all the countries. Here is the rate chart for all the countries.

    I had run a poll some time back and most of them said that they would consider it buying at 16 to 18k range. The actual price works out to nearly double that.

    Anyone finds Iphone worth at Rs. 31000 ?

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    Arun Prabhudesai is founder / chief editor at trak.in. He jumped the Entrepreneurship bandwagon in early 2008 after a long 13 year stint in I.T Industry. You can follow him on twitter @trakin and Facebook. Arun’s Google+ Profile
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    Neeraj August 21, 2008 at 2:24 am

    Arun, I don’t think it is a bad deal after all as you should calculate the life time cost(2Years) and not the initial cost.
    US: $199+$30*24 = 919$=INR40000
    India: INR31000+INR500*24=INR43000
    I am assuming that airtel still sells per month unlimited data plan of INR500.

    Reply

    Rabi Gupta August 21, 2008 at 8:45 am

    I was also thinking of getting one to flaunt!!
    But after knowing the pitfalls and surely the high end price, definitely it’s not my choice now. Indians are always different I guess, and they value things if only things value their money, so based on the price range I-Phone can be a flop here.

    Reply

    Shiva August 21, 2008 at 9:56 am

    To be frank, i too pre-booked it in the hope that the price will be around that of the u.s. price.  But with this price of Rs. 31,000, i would definitely not go for it.  I will probably wait for some time until the price to come down, if it does not then bye bye iphone!

    Reply

    Rahul Narula August 21, 2008 at 8:55 pm

    The original bookings that Vodafone & Airtel are relying on were made on the assumption that iPhone would be priced less than Rs 20K.

    It will be really interesting to find out how many bookings will actually be bought. Even I believe only about 5-10% of them will materialize.

    31k+ is exorbitant for iPhone with its current set of features.

    Reply

    mvp August 22, 2008 at 11:47 pm

    Hi! i follow your blog every week and really appreciate the content.

    about iphones 3G, when PCs come for rs.15000, laptops for rs.25000 and ipods for rs.3000, who the hell thought they can sell it for rs.36000. like many large cos shedding their workforce, vodafone and airtel should shart thinking on similar lines with this kind of junk brains in their marketing dept. the biggest target for any handsets in India are the working executives and they now know it best how worse the scene has changed for them. maybe iphone will have takers like the maharajas or the biz scions, nobody else…
    regards//mvp

    Reply

    Muthu Ramadoss August 23, 2008 at 11:41 pm

    Why are the locked iphones selling for unlocked prices in India?

    Looks like a big scam to me.

    Reply

    Gautam Kshatriya August 26, 2008 at 12:13 am

    I think that Ashish Sinha (pluggD.in) said it all to well when he declared the iPhone an iHype and an iFlop. According to the Economic Times, the launch saw the sale of a measly 10 pieces!

    Gautam Kshatriya
    gautam.kshatriya@moneyvidya.com
    http://www.moneyvidya.com

    Reply

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