OyPhone: Apple’s iPhone Lands in Israel Wednesday
Though Apple hasn’t yet brought the iPhone to Israel, it’s estimated that some 80,000 of them are in use in the country today. That’s a remarkable metric and one that suggests Apple’s super-smart phone should do quite well when it officially arrives at market in Israel this week.
Come Thursday, three of the country’s largest wireless carriers–Cellcom, Orange and Bezeq Israel Telecom–will be peddling the Apple (AAPL) device. They’ll be asking 800 shekels for it, about $210 after a subsidy Bank of America Merrill Lynch figures is somewhere around 2,000 shekels. That’s pretty steep, but as the research house notes, the carriers will more than make up for it with new data revenue. Merrill predicts 300,000 iPhones will be sold in their first year at market in Israel, 3.5 percent of the country’s total mobile phone sales.
“We think it is unlikely to have a major impact on subscriber numbers or market share but that it will be positive for data revenue,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysts wrote. “Also as the three leading players are all offering iPhone we do not anticipate large-scale customer migration from one carrier to another or that any single player will be overburdened with marketing expenses. The immediate impact of the handset subsidy will be felt in lower profitability, but the companies will benefit in the long run from an average-revenue-per-user uplift due to higher data usage, subscription fees and the sale of the iPhone-related services.”
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