Apple's Missed Opportunity

The pundits will go on about the initial weekend sales for the new iPhones, but one thing is clear: Apple has missed an opportunity here.

It's no news that the iPhone 5s is the new flagship model, with a blazingly fast processor, and breakthrough fingerprint sensor. The colorful 5c models have replaced the previous flagship iPhone 5, with only small changes aside from the plastic bodies.

So what's been missed? Apple stock dropped after the September 9 announcement that the 5c would be priced just $100 below the 5s. Investors had been looking for a drop into the lower price range. Personally, I agree with Apple that the 5c should be priced exactly where it is.

What is missing, however, is the iPhone 4c.

There should have been another model added that would relate to the 4s just as the 5c does to the 5s, priced $100 bellow the 4s, unsubsidized at $350.

Source: Apple.com and author's estimates.

Rationale
Apple iOS's main competitor is Android, built by Google. Recently they have pushed their global smartphone market share to almost 80%, largely by dominating the low end market, a segment that Apple does not care to enter - and rightfully so. However, to drop below 14% looks bad. It makes them appear marginalized. A 4c entry would allow Apple to enter a lower tier, and regain significant share.

Features
The theoretical iPhone 4c would sport these feature changes:

1. Case: colorful plastic

2. CPU: A5 chip of 4s

3. Screen: Revert to pre-retina display resolution (163 ppi)

4. Memory: Revert to 8 GB

5. Camera: 6 Megapixel

It's quite possible that Apple could produce such a device for under $150 in hardware and component costs, which suggests that a $350 iPhone 4c could fetch hardware margins of over 57%. In contrast, IHS iSuppli estimates that the new iPhone 5s costs $199 to build after including manufacturing costs, while the iPhone 5c total is around $173.

Sales
With the strongly reduced feature set, I do not think that the 4c would significantly cannibalize higher priced models. This is seen in the new 5s. Reports have sales of 5s outnumbering 5c by 2.4 to one. It shows that the existence of a lower priced model does not necessarily cannibalize the higher priced one when there is significant differentiation.

Fortune's Philip Elmer-DeWitt wrote a few weeks ago of Apple's low end opportunity:

And he quotes Daryanani:

Granted, he is talking of a sub $300 price point, so let's round his 56 million units down to 50 million. Even if there was some cannibalization from the 4s, this would bring in more than $17.5 billion new revenue. . This could potentially add over $4.40 in earnings per share.

Margins
Some would argue that this would only increase Apple's woes by further compressing margins. But there are two points to make here. First, the gross margin is significantly lower for the 5, but not horrendously lower. More importantly, $17.5 billion is a large number for incremental revenue, and would go a long way to reducing overhead and operations as a percentage of overall revenue, so it is likely that this would counteract the slightly lower gross margin.

Conclusion
Apple has a great game plan and will probably thrive on its new iPhone product line. Still, it seems to have thrown away a great opportunity to expand its reach into the smartphone culture and bring in millions of new customers. This would reach into the growing share of Google's Android operating system led by Samsung, and Apple could have done this without sacrificing the quality that they prize so much.

Apple will thrive, but I believe they could have done even better.

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The article Apple's Missed Opportunity originally appeared on Fool.com.

Malcolm Manness owns shares of Apple. The Motley Fool recommends Apple. The Motley Fool owns shares of Apple. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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