Apple’s marketing boss has quashed rumours that the firm is planning to produce a budget version of its iPhone. Phil Schiller, head of marketing at Apple has told a Chinese newspaper that “cheap smartphones” will “never be the future of Apple’s products”. The comments to the Shanghai Evening News follow soon after reports from The […]
Apple’s marketing boss has quashed rumours that the firm is planning to produce a budget version of its iPhone. Phil Schiller, head of marketing at Apple has told a Chinese newspaper that “cheap smartphones” will “never be the future of Apple’s products”. The comments to the Shanghai Evening News follow soon after reports from The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg that said a cheaper iPhone was in the works.
“Every product that Apple creates, we consider using only the best technology available,” he said. “This includes the production pipeline, the Retina display, the unibody design, to provide the best product to the market.”
“At first, non-smartphones were popular in the Chinese market, now cheap smartphones are more popular and non-smartphones are out,” he said.
But he rejected calls for Apple to make a “cheap” iPhone, saying that “despite the popularity of cheap smartphones, this will never be the future of Apple’s products.”
“In fact, although Apple’s market share of smartphones is just about 20 per cent, we own the 75 per cent of the profit.”
It has been reported that Mr Schiller and Mr Cook are visiting China in the hope of making a distribution deal with China Mobile, by far the country’s largest operator, with 700 million subscribers.
Mr Cook told the official news agency Xinhua he expected to see growth for Apple in China.
“China is currently our second largest market. I believe it will become our first. I believe strongly that it will,” he said.
