Handful of Nothing

Wow! that’s a huge headline :) Well after seeing / reading some big consultancy companies going back to the desk to work on their iPhone sales prediction, because they remembered that small detail that MOST OF THE WORLD is not the US… I will try to make a small comparison for people to understand with my other hobby : Guitars.

What guitars has to do with mobile phones or the iphone sales? Well… As I explained in the other post, iPhone cannot sell a lot in a lot of countries because of price. People then said “Are you dumb? it’s only 199 now, in some countries it’s even free!”. yeah yeah yeah, but is it free or 199 without contract? No! So how much it would cost? something around 500 US they say. But wait.. we are talking about imported products, and for that I give you the Guitar example:

This is my consumer dream nowadays : A Steve morse signature guitar:

It cost 1.4k USD. today’s exchange rate is at 1.6 BR$ for each dolar, so this would give us the final price of 2240 BR$. The same could be applied to the iphone, at 500 USD, going for only 800 BR$. Affordable :)

But then enter a common 3rd world / emergent country taxes crushing style customs! And your 1.4k dollars guitar has turned into this:

Yes. you saw it right, 8.300 Br$ (and this is cheaper than the official distributor recommends) so we are talking about 5243.12 USD :) Magic? No baby just taxes over taxes :) This is actually better than the ps3 case that I talked when it was launched, the ps3 at 599 got here for 8k also.

So, 5k Dolars :) you can by a round trip with hotel for the US, buy 2 guitars, come back, pay all the taxes, and sell one guitar and you will have the 5k back and 1 guitar. Magic.

Now, what about a 500 USD phone? Even with the 199 USD you can compare with other eletronics: the Wii costs 249 right? Here in Brazil it costs 1.599, or 1000 USD :) So the best price for the iPhone will be something at 500 USD WITH contract (I’m putting here that the carrier will make it free, but it will have to pay the taxes to import the phone) and the minimum salary is 2 times lower than this :)