Apple's first retail store in Brazil opened in Rio de Janeiro this weekend, with approximately 1,700 customers waiting in line for the grand opening (via The Globe]. Customers started queueing up on Thursday night for the Saturday morning debut, with groups waiting both inside and outside the Village Mall.
Photo from The Globe
The opening of the Rio de Janeiro store was announced last week on the company's website and is Apple's first store in Latin America. The store has a fairly unique single floor, pavilion-style design with a curved glass exterior. Unlike most other Apple retail stores, the Rio de Janeiro location features a split-concept layout where one half of the store is dedicated to product demonstrations while the other half is focused on accessory sales and services.
Speaking to Brazilian news site The Globe, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer confirmed that Brazil was an increasingly important market for Apple. The Rio de Janeiro store is part of a larger plan to tap into the Latin American market, which traditionally has been a weak market for Apple due to the high import taxes levied on electronic devices.
Apple will be selling its full product lineup in the Rio store, including the iPhone 5S starting at the equivalent of $1,174, with high taxes making it the most expensive Apple retail store for iPhone purchases (via Bloomberg).
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Markets aren't rational which is why the 'pure free market' simply doesn't work - why there are controls such as halting the the trade when there is a rapid drop of a stock etc. End of the day Apple is a maturing company and the people wanting a quick buck off the back of unsustainable high growth rates are going to move on just as what happened with Microsoft (Steve Balmer doubled the revenue of Microsoft yet apparently he has been a failure - ok).
Regarding the price of Apple products - Brazil is apparently addressing the issue of tariffs but you'll find in many cases the tariffs are the only effective way for a developing country to raise government revenue given that the institutions required for regular and consistent taxation just aren't there yet (I'd hazard to guess that less than 30% of the population pays income tax) hence their reliance on being able to collect tax at the boarders on imported goods or taxing businesses instead. Long term Brazil will eventually have to get its act sorted out and address the structural institutional problems or otherwise it'll end up losing the faith of investors who need a stable and secure basis on which they'll invest their money.
I was at Oak Brook mall in Illinois this weekend and the Apple Store there moved to a much bigger place. I'd say easily 3x the size of the original store, and it was still crowded.
Anyone else wonder if Microsoft will soon open its own store near the store in Rio? The one in Oak Brook is pretty cool, but empty. Plus, the people working at the M$ version of the Genius Bar were kinda of jerks, but that's a different story entirely.
An iPhone 5S 16GB costs $812 considering a 400min 4G/LTE plan (with 6GB of usage per month). This plan costs $137 a month.
The price of $1174 given in the article is without a contract.
And.. Yes.. It's a rip off!