Category: Industry

ifoAppleStore’s Gary Allen alleges that John Browett, head of Apple Retail, felt the stores were “too bloated”. He cites “numerous tipsters” that Browett ordered a reduction in the number of employees. As the information on employees and visitors is public, we can quickly test the assumption.

The following graph shows the relationship between Retail employees and Visitors on a global basis.

The total figure for the last quarter was 41,000 employees for 83 million visitors. This is above the expected ratio as shown by the line shown in the graph. Reversion to that line would imply that about 35,000 employees should have sufficed during that quarter.

However, Apple’s business is cyclical and employment is not–or at least not on the same frequency of cycle. Continue reading “Are Apple stores overstaffed?”

According to data from comScore, in the past 24 months 50 million Americans became Android phone users. In the same time frame Apple added 24 million iPhone users. As I mentioned in my Asymmetric Competition post, it would be unwise to consider this data in isolation. Consider the following graph showing the net change in users in the US.

Android and iPhone grew mostly at the expense of non-smart users. The BlackBerry lost 8.1 million users and all the others only lost about 4.5 million.

With penetration at 50% it’s still impressive that there is so little “churn” between platforms. In fact, measuring churn as the net platform user loss as a percent of all smartphone users, we get something less than 1% per month.

The smartphone competition is still primarily with non-consumption.

That will change at some point when smartphone penetration (shown below) will begin to saturate. Continue reading “The biggest loser”

The Mac grew at the extremely low rate of 1.8% over last year’s second quarter. Although it grew faster than the Windows PC market, the gap has narrowed quite a bit. The following graph shows the growth of the two members of the computing Ancien Régime.

We have to wait a few more quarters before we can decide whether the Mac will enter a new phase of diminished expectations. Although it’s not immune from the impact of the iPad, the effect can take a long time to be evident and in either case, growth can come from conversion of Windows users which vastly outnumber loyal Mac users who might upgrade.

If we see the computing market as the superset of keyboard+mouse input and touch-based input then new computing consumption becomes easier to spot: Continue reading “Perspective and Context in Personal Computing”

In my last podcast (Impatient for Growth) I mentioned my frustration at Apple’s slow entry into emerging markets outside of China. I cited Tim Cook’s comments that he did not see an opportunity there in the short term. He mentioned the multi-level distribution challenge which I took to mean the difficulty in setting up Apple stores (in itself due to restrictions on foreign owned retail chains) and the absence of device/service bundling.

This requires more analysis and the best place to start is to look at the data available.

The market potential is enormous. Globally, there are 6 billion mobile cellular subscriptions (end of 2011, ITU) and 86% penetration, but only 1 billion have mobile broadband subscriptions (which make ownership of a smartphone worthwhile).  In India there are 893 million subs (vs 986 million in China).

In 2011 142 million mobile cellular subscriptions were added in India, more than in the Arab States, CIS and Europe put together.

So the potential and growth are spectacular. But that is just 2G. Mobile broadband (i.e. 3G) is rare. Globally, developing countries have only 8% mobile broadband penetration vs. 51% in the developed world. Mobile broadband is a proxy for mass adoption of the iPhone (though perhaps not for Android inasmuch as it’s employed as a feature phone).

The situation for 3G in India is even worse than the overall developing world. Continue reading “Cracking the India Code”