Along with the fall of the ruble, prices for high-tech products (including iPhone) should soon rise. About whether they are growing now, and how much they can grow next year, we talked with “M.Video”.
In recent days, due to the situation around the ruble exchange rate, which has lost at least a quarter of its value against foreign currencies since the beginning of 2014, information about the imminent radical increase in prices for Apple devices has begun to leak into the network more and more often.
It is clear that such informational occasions are not without meaning. Most high-tech devices are imported to Russia from abroad, where they are purchased by wholesale companies for foreign currency. And against the background of the falling ruble exchange rate, it would be strange if the cost of such products in Russia would not grow along with the exchange rate.
The problem is that not only import prices are rising, but also gasoline prices. Moreover, Russia is almost the only country in which, despite the fall in oil prices, gasoline prices continue to rise (in fairness, gasoline is still cheaper in Russia than in most regions, but in the United States it is only 4 cents more expensive). In other words, along with the increase in the cost of goods, the cost of their transportation radically increases. And this applies not only to Apple products.
The attention in this situation to the “apple” company can be explained not only by the special cult status of the company, which was the first to start mass-producing smartphones and staged a show around this, but also by the fact that Apple has been striving to go beyond the premium-only segment in recent years. Only if other companies that pursue similar goals, as a rule, start producing budget devices, then Apple goes a slightly different way: products from a year / two years ago are transferred to the conditionally budget segment of the company’s goods (and iPhones 5C is no exception here, apart from the design – the device is a copy of the iPhone 5).
Be that as it may, the radical rise in the price of Apple’s already expensive products may become an additional obstacle to further growth in the level of penetration of the company’s devices among a wide audience.
But here the question is how much the prices of mobile gadgets will actually rise and, of course, when it will happen.
“There is currently no confirmed information about the price increase for Apple smartphones,” Yulia Zotova, public relations manager at M.Video, told us.
By the way, this morning our colleagues with Cnews.ru they reported an increase in prices for the iPhone 6 on the M network.Video” (now the material has already been updated). We could not confirm this information, the devices are simply not on sale.
“The cost of the devices from the previous batch has not changed, but only the iPhone 6 Plus is available,” Yulia confirmed.
Along with the lack of a price tag, there are no devices themselvesIn Svyaznoy, for example, the price of a smartphone still starts at 31,990 rubles.
But if you look at the average price tag of the iPhone 6 (16 GB) on yandex.market, it turns out that it is 35,999 rubles. A thousand more expensive now in “M.video” is the iPhone 6 Plus.
We will not be surprised if prices for devices from other manufacturers go up as rapidly soon. This is not excluded in the retail network.
“As for other manufacturers, it is also impossible to say unequivocally, but we predict a possible increase in the telecom category from 5 to 15% in the new year. At the same time, the buyer should not feel hesitation, because competition and the rapid appearance of new products reduces the cost of top models by about 20-30% in six months,” Yulia noted.
It is clear that this will also affect the growth dynamics of the Russian mobile games market. The question is: how much and how exactly?
Also on the topic: Smartphone sales in Russia increased by 16%