Apple's iTunes stores will complete ecosystem, offer multiple benefits, says Frost & Sullivan

Manoj Menon, Partner and Southeast Asia Managing Director for Frost & Sullivan said “This is a fantastic development for consumers in Asia. Apple's growth in these markets was predominantly fueled by the hardware sales. This announcement will help Apple leverage the completeness of its ecosystem a lot better in these markets”. 

 

With mobile devices being hugely popular in these markets, Menon says this step forward will enable Apple to compete more effectively with Android. Android based phones have done relatively well in several of these countries because of the lower price models that are available from a variety of different manufacturers. “The iTunes store is also a way to get long term relationships with customers  as the iTunes store can be a big differentiator” he added. 

 

Menon says this also opens the market for Asian content owners to leverage this platform to drive sales in their home markets.  This will accelerate market development of digital content in this region.   

 

The launch was welcomed and very well received, “This may also be a very positive development towards helping the industry fight piracy in several of these countries. The availability of content in attractively packaged and priced formats will encourage and enable several users to stay away from piracy. This is a very powerful development for the industry and the ecosystem” Menon stated. 

 

Regional giants China, India and Indonesia were not a part of the launch today and Menon noted, “Apple also needs to urgently be able to launch the iTunes Store in these countries, particularly China and India. This has not yet been announced, but these markets will be key to long term continued growth for Apple. 

 

For Thailand, Monsinee Keeratikrainon, Country Manager, Frost & Sullivan (Thailand) commented that We also expect new players in content service while existing Content providers will need to be more creative and dynamic. There will be major increase in revenue from online content as people will be more open and perceptive to buy than using illegal formats. Current revenue from music downloads is considers not that high, around 1,500million Bht. With given alternative channel in Itune and more variety of media, the market size is estimated to increase two folds by next year.

 

“Telcos, esp. Mobile operators may view Itune's entrance a slight threat in content service. But the overall gain to them will be much higher as more download demand will drive the use of broadband data. And charging for network is the core  business of all telcos. Whilst in the past there has been some movement in telcos going into content service. But this initiative at the end also aims to drive usage and revenue for network. The ARPU for 3G and broadband services will be heightened while there be increasing proportion of  data revenue to mobile operators, from 23% to almost 40% in the next 3 yrs,” she added.