After confirming that iPhone sales revenue dropped year over year, Apple today revealed that it plans to lower the price of the iPhone in some countries.
Apple CEO Tim Cook explains that outside the U.S., his company typically set the price of iPhones in U.S. dollars, which resulted in the phones being more expensive when those prices were translated to local currency. Now Apple will go back to those countries and just the pricing of its iPhones to be more in line with what its local prices were a year ago in the hopes of boosting iPhone sales.
"“When you look at foreign currencies and then particularly those markets that weakened over the last year those (iPhone price) increases were obviously more,” Cook said to Reuters. “And so as we’ve gotten into January and assessed the macroeconomic condition in some of those markets we’ve decided to go back to more commensurate with what our local prices were a year ago in hopes of helping the sales in those areas.”
Earlier this month, Apple said that it was lowering its revenue guidance for the fiscal Q1 2019 quarter. The company blamed the change on there being fewer iPhone upgrades than it expected as well as economic weakness in some emerging markets. Apple's low-cost iPhone battery replacement program was also blamed for the lower revenue.
Now Apple will attempt to boost its sales in some parts of the globe by lowering iPhone prices to be in line with how local prices used to be in those markets. Apple still made $52 billion in revenue from the iPhone in Q1 2019, but the company likely isn't pleased with the 15 percent YoY drop, and so now it's taking steps to get some of that revenue back.