WorldWide Tech & Science. Roberto Gómez.
Deutsche Bank's Chris Whitmore is telling clients to expect both -- an iPhone 5 ( to match iOS5 and an iPhone 4S.
"With Nokia and RIMM struggling," he writes, "the time is right for Apple to aggressively penetrate the mid range smart-phone market (i.e. $300-500 category) to dramatically expand its total addressable market and market share."
As Whitmore sees it, an iPhone 4S that is unlocked, priced around $349, and comes with a pre-paid voice plan would "drive significantly greater penetration" into an addressable market that has grown to include 1.5 billion potential customers in 98 countries, two thirds of whom prefer pre-paid plans.
In the U.S., most cellphones are subsidized by carriers with contracts that allow them to recoup the cost of the phone in monthly payments. But as the above chart shows, there are large swaths of the world -- especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where iPhone penetration is low -- where customers prefer to pay the full cost of the phone upfront.
Note that analysts for some time have been calling for Apple to release a lower cost, pre-paid iPhone, and that Whitmore does not cite any sources or claim any inside knowledge for his two-iPhone theory.
His analysis is supported with the figure 5 chart of Pre-paid vs Post-paid subs by region of Apple´s announced carrier relationships, bellow.
Source: CNNMoney
