Vodafone, the world’s largest mobile-phone company, has announced that it’s signed an agreement with Apple to sell the iPhone in 10 of its markets starting later in 2008. Vodafone will offer the phone in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa, and Turkey.
In a separate announcement, Telecom Italia also said it will sell the iPhone in Italy by the end of the year, making it the first country to be officially announced with no carrier exclusivity agreement in place, a change from Apple’s past iPhone business model. “This is definitely a sign Apple is capitulating,” Will Draper, an analyst at Execution, said.
“The initial model was that Apple would give the iPhone to a network on an exclusive basis, but in Europe, where you have the likes of Nokia and Sony Ericsson selling sophisticated 3G devices, the iPhone simply isn’t seen as such a premium product.” The ten countries named in the announcement represent a total population of more than 1.4 billion people.
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