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Who Next? Where Next? For Apple's iPhone |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Thursday, 05 July 2007 |
With more than half
a million Americans now proudly prancing about their 4 of July
celebrations showing off their prized Apple iPhone's, it's time for the
press to start looking for another angle and that turns out to be the
guessing game of who gets access to the iPhone next.
Once the hardware geeks got a hold of the iPhone and ripped it apart to
work out what it was really worth (which it runs out is a little less
than half what you will pay), the software geeks took to the BIOS
software to see what they could learn.
This caused a flutter of speculation when it appeared Apple has set up
the software to work with more than just the AT&T service provider
it is launching with. While AT&T (an apparently unpopular mobile
phone service provider if you believe what you read) has a five year
exclusive agreement with Apple to have the iPhone on its network, the
rest of the world is still up for grabs.
Judging by the icons already stored in the US version of the phone,
there are three potential carriers AT&T/Cingular, T-Mobile and
Vodafone are all listed as default service providers for the phone.
As you can imagine this led to speculation that Vodafone, which is
pretty big in the UK and Europe was going to get the deal. T-Mobile
would potentially get the iPhone in Germany.
Vodafone was the front runner in the pre-launch speculation and by all
accounts it is trying to get a deal together, but now the Times On Line
has claimed the successful carrier for the UK is in fact O2 rather than
Vodafone, putting the whole globe into a state of suspended disbelief
and confusion.
O2 is a relatively small carrier owned by Telefónica, of Spain could do
extremely well out of an exclusive UK deal for the Apple handset.
According to the Times, Vodafone found Apple's terms just a little hard
to swallow and backed away from the deal in the final negotiations.
With only 18 million or so subscriber in the UK, the deal could be
worth a lot more to O2 which the Times says is trying to establish
itself as the premier mobile music provider in the United Kingdom.
If the report is correct, rumours that T-Mobile has the rights in
Germany and of course Orange is tipped as the likely front-runner in
France.
But with estimatres that APple could garner as much as 10 per cent of the smartphone market, there is a lot of business at stake and like AT&T some carriers could be prepared to do a deal with Apple get acces to this guaranteed business.
Industry research outfit, Strategy Analytics predicts the Apple iPhone range will account for a 10 per cent share of total smartphone sales in the United States by the end of this year.
Neil Mawston, Associate Director at Strategy Analytics said, “We
forecast 20 million smartphones to be sold in the USA during 2007. We
expect Apple and its iPhone portfolio to account for 2 million of that
total, giving it a 10 percent share by the end of the year.”
If it achieves this it will be a spectacular success. A success considerably more spectatuclar than the company achieved with the iPod. With the company selling in excess of half a million iPhones in the first few days of launch, a 2 million unit second half is not out of the question.
David Kerr, Vice President at Strategy Analytics, asks: “A critical question will be what percentage of iPhone buyers will be churning from other operators? A second key issue is whether the iPhone will draw users who would otherwise have bought Nokia N series music and multimedia devices, eroding their premium tier share, or will iPhone most dramatically impact the SEMC Walkman series fortunes?"
Prior to the iPhone launch, the researcher was predicting the deal was worth US$1.4 Billion in service revenues for AT&T. That analysis was based on the sale of three million iPhones over the first three quarters of the five year deal and indicates new revenues driven by iPhone sales.
develop as a result of the exclusive iPhone deal at AT&T.
Like the music publishers who took a punt on Apple's iTunes store, the carriers who do a deal with Steve Jobs to secure the exclusive iPhones rights in major markets will be signing up to almost guaranteed revenues during the life of the deal.
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