Apple's India dilemma

The world's biggest rising market may force Apple to choose: Go cheap or go home

There is much work to be done.
(Image credit: REUTERS/Adnan Abidi)

Apple's much-anticipated live-stream event later today has all the drama we've come to expect from the Silicon Valley powerhouse: A potential raft of new gizmos, showing off Apple's insistence on always one-upping itself. But behind the scenes, a much more complicated drama is playing out for the tech behemoth: Namely, Apple is running out of markets for its most successful product, the iPhone.

The company's flagship device has already saturated the markets in the U.S and Europe — and it seems well on its way to saturating the market in China, too. Experts now estimate that 80 to 90 percent of the consumers in China who can buy a high-end smartphone already have one. Growth in the country's smartphone market has slowed to a virtual standstill, along with the rest of its economy.

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Jeff Spross

Jeff Spross was the economics and business correspondent at TheWeek.com. He was previously a reporter at ThinkProgress.