Apple finally gets serious about India

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Editor's note: For years, Apple didn’t really care about India; in more recent times, it became that India didn’t really care about Apple. This did not go well. The very small premium smartphone market, growing competition by premium Android smartphones with more perceived value and unorganized distribution channels meant iPhone sales tanked in 2018 to their lowest in five years. The company scrambled to overhaul its strategy in what is now the world’s second largest smartphone market, with long-pending moves on price cuts, local manufacturing and distribution. During an analyst call after its quarterly earnings report last month, Apple CEO Tim Cook mentioned India twice. “We had double-digit growth in many developed markets, including the US, the UK, France and Singapore, and also grew double digits in emerging markets led by strong performances in Brazil, Mainland China, India, Thailand and Turkey,” Cook said on the call. If you look at the numbers for 2019 as a whole, Apple just did okay—according to Counterpoint Research, iPhone shipments grew 6% in India last year. But remember, this was after a 43% decline the year …