Last month, while travelling through Yangon, Burma, I asked my guide to take a picture of me. As I handed him my iPhone, I asked, “You know how to take it, right?” He responded, slightly offended, “Of course.”
I only meant to ask if he had used an iPhone before; I would have asked my mother the same thing. The concern was purely practical: if he didn’t know what to press, I could show him quickly.
Apple doesn’t sell the iPhone in Burma, according to a spokeswoman. It has two authorized resellers in Yangon, which sell Mac computers, but that’s it. But Thurien Myint, my guide, told me that the most admired phones in Burma are the iPhone 5C, which costs roughly a thousand dollars, and the iPhone 5S, with a price tag of about fourteen hundred dollars. And they’re not sold in some shady alleyway, he said; there’s a proper store in a shopping mall. But are people actually buying iPhones, or only coveting them?
Burma’s parliamentary elections, held in November, 2010, ushered in a new government the following January. Many considered the elections flawed, and Thein Sein, the new President, appointed several former and current military officers to the government. But Thein Sein’s administration has also opened up the country to the outside world, inviting tourists and investments in a variety of sectors, including telecom.
Burma is still a country without much transparency, and information about the number of phones shipped there is limited. For the first half of last year, a total of a hundred and sixty thousand phones were shipped to Burma, says International Data Corporation, a research firm that recently started tracking the market. To put that in perspective, during the same period, more than twelve million phones were shipped to Vietnam, a hundred and twenty-three million were shipped to India, and two hundred and four million were shipped to China.
“It’s still a very small market that’s just started opening up,” Melissa Chau, an I.D.C. analyst, told me. In the first half of 2013, the manufacturer with the greatest market share was Huawei, whose phones start at a hundred and ten dollars. Samsung was second, followed by HTC. Apple ranked seventh, with less than one per cent of the market, according to Chau.
On Monday, Apple reported that it sold fifty-one million iPhones in the fourth quarter of 2013, falling short of the fifty-five million that analysts had expected. “Many investors have been worried that essentially all the wealthy people already have high-end smartphones,” Toni Sacconaghi, a financial analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, told the Times, referring to markets like the United States and Western Europe. Demand in emerging markets, including China, Latin America, and Russia, remained strong. Apple should do even better in Asia now that it has partnered with China Mobile, the world’s largest service provider, to start selling iPhones in China.
But the iPhone 5S—at eight hundred and seventy dollars in China and fourteen hundred dollars in Burma—is still out of reach for most Asians and is far from being popular. After an initial burst of sales, Apple could hit a wall in Asia, as it has in the West: for too many people, iPhones may simply be too expensive.
The Burmese case is an extreme one, of course. Since iPhones aren’t officially sold there, their prices are especially high; the few that make it into the country are gray-market units bought in the United States, Hong Kong, Singapore, and elsewhere, Chau explained. Still, the country serves as a cautionary tale for Apple as it tries to persuade Asians to pay a lot of money for the cachet of being an iPhone owner, much more than competitors are asking for their phones.
Burma is one of the only countries in the world where cell phones remain rare. Until a couple of years ago, it was practically impossible for someone not connected to military rulers to get service. Even then, people had to pay up to three thousand dollars for a phone. But the situation has started to change: now they can buy a SIM card for about two hundred dollars. Incoming calls are free, and outgoing calls cost about five cents a minute. To help expand access to SIM cards—and, surely, as a publicity stunt—the government has started a raffle where the winner gets a SIM card for only two dollars. To enter, you just fill out a form and deposit it at a government office. The catch is that there is only one winner a month, although losers, if they’re willing to put in a fresh application, can reapply.
Burma’s two domestic cell-phone operators offer poor coverage and service, but last June the government handed new fifteen-year telecom licenses to Telenor, of Norway, and Ooredoo, of Qatar. With these companies preparing to beef up the country’s telecom infrastructure, it’s now only a matter of time before cell phones become as ubiquitous in the country as bicycles once were. (Those who can afford motorcycles and cars have left their bikes behind.) Already, the change in cell-phone access is fairly visible in urban areas. And, even if people don’t have cell phones, they certainly are up to speed on the latest models, as I discovered during my travels.
I was using my phone to take a picture at a temple in Bagan, an ancient city with hundreds of Buddhist temples, when I noticed that a kid who had been selling trinkets to tourists was peering over my shoulder as I knelt on the ground. “Oh, iPhone!” he said. He added, in a more subdued tone, “Oh, 4. Hmm.” And he walked away.
Megha Bahree is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi. She writes about business and development in India and elsewhere in the subcontinent.
Photograph by Prasit Chansareekorn/Flickr Vision/Getty.
