Thursday, January 18, 2007

after the big mac index, now comes the ipod index!



jan 17th, 2007

in other words, the same thing costs 222/149 = 1.48 times more in india as compared to the US.

now apple's pricing policy may include an overseas uplift of 35%, which suggests to me that the rupee is 48-35 = 13% overvalued against the dollar.

this is a strange conclusion and would imply a future devaluation in the price of the rupee but that is not what the markets are saying.

another other possibility is that apple is ripping indians off :-(

the third possibility is that there is so much unaccounted-for/black money in india that people really don't care how much they are spending on something that has snob value.

none of these is a particularly positive interpretation.

what do you think?

http://in.news.yahoo.com/070118/137/6b9tm.html



1 comment:

AGworld said...

Apple is not ripping indians off -- the indian government is!

Remember that 30% of the price of a car in india goes to the government (in terms of excise, sales tax, vat, octroi and more).

Which is of course, spent on making madrassas or churches.

When you have the all powerful indian government to rip off indians, Steve Jobs is a nobody.

But, in all fairness, higher prices are seen in india only for niche or snob items -- things that are legitly imported and sold are very cheap.

Mobile phones in india cost, to the rupee, less than they do in singapore or elsewhere.

I bought an HP 6516 windows phone a year ago in mumbai (will bill, from an HP shop) for LESS than it costs TODAY in singapore.

And also remember that the price of goods made in india is substantially lower than that of imports. Take clothes for instance. A top quality, pure cotton two ply shirt for Rs 600-1000 (which is about 15-20 dollars) is below TJ maxx's prices.

Imports suck, though!