Apple plans to expand its App Store, Apple Music and other of its services to dozens of new markets in Africa, the Middle East and other regions around the globe.
The tech giant made it known it would expand its App Store to about 20 more countries worldwide 8 of which are African nation and will be offering its streaming music platform, the Apple Music service to 52 additional countries and regions. This expansion would be the largest since Apple grew what was then called the iTunes Store to India, Russia and more than 50 other countries back in 2012.
Apple had since 2018 being working on growing its service based business which totaled 17.8% of its $260.1 billion in revenue in its recent fiscal year as there is a slow growth in consumers upgrade of their smartphones.
Apple executives said in January that the company had an installed base of 1.5 billion active devices and aimed to reach 600 million subscribers to either its own or third-party services by the end of this year.
- Advertisement -
The App Store is one of the company’s biggest service revenue generator where it gets a cut of about 15% to 30% of sales. The new markets Apple service business will be expanding to in Africa includes Cameroon, Ivory Coast, DR Congo, Gabon, Libya, Morocco, Rwanda and Zambia.
While other countries and region will include Maldives and Myanmar in the Asia-Pacific region, Afghanistan and Iraq in the Middle East, and several nations in the Balkans and Oceania, for a total of 175 countries.
The Apple music is also getting expanded which will be a total of 167 markets in general. Apple’s top streaming rival, Spotify, currently operates in 79 countries.
As for the usage of the services, there will be different terms and pricing for music streaming in different regions. The company offers a three-month free trial and charges US$9.99 for it’s US-based customers. This price could be reduced as the company is said to be planning to offer as much as six-months of free trial for users in Ivory Coast and Myanmar and reduce monthly subscription to just US$4.99 for users in Kuwait and Iraq.
