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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MGV who wrote (162986)	12/15/2013 10:02:44 PM
From: slacker711	1 Recommendation Recommended By pyslent Respond to of 213173

My point is that your threshold for believing something to be true is ridiculously high. It isnt fact but the jump in purchase commitments just before the release of the iPhone also is more than "unsubstantiated rumors". Apple had enormous leverage in that deal with VZ and exploited it. I think that they were able to do something similar with Docomo. It is an open question whether they were able to do something similar with CM. The company is in a much better position than they were last year when their TD-SCDMA network was floundering. They have been gaining share in 3G all year and will be the only 4G provider for quite a while. That commitment matters. Both CU and CT were able to drop their subsidies on the iPhone pretty substantially over the last year. We can hope that Apple was able to extract better terms from CM to force a price war, but it is definitely a big variable in any iPhone unit projection over the next year. Slacker

To: MGV who wrote (162986)	12/16/2013 1:13:15 AM
From: pyslent	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213173

"Over 1/2 of all smartphone activations in Apple's seasonally slowest quarter were iPhones. " Not to put too fine a point to it, but who cares? As impressive as this fact is, what do you imagine is the significance to this discussion? Do you believe it to preclude the existence of a volume commitment clause, or tell you something about its magnitude? What does TMobile's 15% iPhone share in the same time frame tell you about their volume commitment, if anything? There is evidence that both Sprint and VZ had agreed to volume commitments that cleverly align their interests with Apple's. This counteracts the natural disincentive that comes from Apple demanding the industry's highest subsidy (careful, I'm speaking in absolute dollar amounts, not percentages). I view the volume commitments as a good thing-- i said so at the time. Message 28029673 Maybe you disagree that Apple ever had the clout to push something like this down the throats of the carriers, but remember, this was a time when the iPhone was doubling sales every year, with no end in sight.