Fans of the iPhone in Argentina may have to wait at least a year to officially purchase the Apple device, as the government continues to impose restrictions on imports of the world’s bestselling smartphone.
The Wall Street Journal reports that whilst the iPhone isn’t banned in the country, its restrictions on mobile operators extend to devices that are not in manufactured there. With Apple’s main supply partners located in Asia (for now), it doesn’t fulfill that criteria and therefore sales are restricted in the country.
According to the report, Apple only sold 3,000 iPhones in Argentina before government restrictions were put in place in March 2011, selling 30,000 in 2010. Whilst the device doesn’t appear to have been as successful in Argentina as in North America and parts of Europe, consumers are still purchasing Apple smartphones when they travel abroad or turn to auction or private trade websites to buy an unlocked handset from overseas.
In December, we questioned whether Argentina had actually banned the device, after reports suggested this was the case. While the ban and other details were false, imports of the iPhone were — and continue to be — blocked.
Apple lists three carriers on its website, two of which have iPhone references (one has listings for various models) but no way to buy them. The Movistar forum even has a dedicated iPhone section, which is full of customers that have purchased iPhones overseas or second-hand but have issues using them on the operator’s networks.
On the Argentinean section of its official website, Apple suggests buying an iPhone 4S from neighbouring Latin American countries:
The ban is in place to encourage Argentinean consumers to buy locally produced or manufactured products and devices, with President Cristina Kirchner advocating the system to create jobs and lower the amount of money spent on overseas imports.
It is believed that the iPhone situation might change when Apple iPhone and iPad supplier Foxconn starts mass-producing the devices in Brazil but even then, they won’t be manufactured within Argentina.
An another brick to the wall. Iphone sales actually were low in Argentina since the Carriers prefer not to sell this device, because Apple is close and strict with how the carriers should ship the device, one of my sources in one of the three carriers in Argentin tell me that iPhone is not a product they want to request for opening the imports again since is a product that not allow them to modify on configuration or applications pre installed and also consume a lot of bandwidth that they prefer to keep controlled.
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Likepablovittori Thank you for your insight. It's actually pretty difficult to get any information from the carriers in the country.
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LikeI'm the owner of an iOS develepment shop in Argentina, actually we are out of iPhones locally for a year or so. The argentinian government issued a block in phones imports to support and boost the local production, but in fact, no one has a factory here, not RIM nor Motorola or Samsung, all local companies are assemblers not producers, a small team of people put the pieces together back from kits and that's all, no production at all.
The same thing happens with Notebooks and Netbooks. we cannot buy or import Macbooks or any other notebook not assembled in Argentina. It's about protectionism of the local industry but in fact is about giving a big business for Political friends with assembly lines with a minimun impact on jobs. Same thing is spreading to other markets like pharmaceuticals where some imported drugs where banned and today we are facing a lack of prescription durgs.
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