Apple Reseller Forced to Close In Select City Mall After Tech Giant’s Store Opening

Barely days after the inauguration of the Apple store at the Select Citywalk Mall of Saket, Delhi, ‘premium’ reseller Apple Imagine shuts down.

Apple had presented a list of 20 resellers to the mall management that were asked to shut down pertaining to the Saket store inauguration an ET report said. 

Also, Apple had asked Reliance Jio World Drive Mall to bar about two dozen competitor brands from having any kind of presence near its BKC store. 

Apple Imagine store was functional for nine years, and the mall authority has denied an extension of the lease agreement with Apple Imagine. Out of the 24 authorised resellers of Apple, Imagine was a significant one that opened in 2014.

According to the publication sources, the mall authority did not take a lease ahead as it considered that the official store of the Apple will do better than the one reselling the same products. Otherwise, Apple would have opened the store at someplace else, Apple Imagine could have been saved.

Overall, the scenario questions the role of a tech giant like Apple in the retail market structuring of India, while it eyes India as a key market.

Further, reportedly, the Select Citywalk Mall signed an agreement with the tech giant of not having stores of Amazon, Bose, Devialet, Facebook, Foxconn, Alphabet/Google, Huawei, Intel, Lenovo, LG, Microsoft, Nest, Nokia, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, Vivo, Xiaomi, Oppo and OnePlus anywhere near the Apple store. 

The Apple Saket store was inaugurated by CEO Tim Cook on April 20th, this month, which is the second official store of India, the first one being Apple BKC in Mumbai. The tech giant has equipped the store with technical experts with knowledge of everything from setting up Apple accounts to recovering one.

In fact, customers ordering products online will be able to pick those products from the store. These features of the store make it customer friendly which is itself a big challenge for the competitors and resellers to cope with. 

Apple has been actively investing and creating jobs in India along with its vendors. Recently, Minister of State, Electronics, and IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, tweeted that the tech giant has generated more than 1 Lakh jobs in the country. In fact, the production of iPhones has also tripled in the country.

Additionally, its vendor Foxconn, announced that it looks forward to investing in Telangana and Karnataka to set up Apple’s product manufacturing units. Meanwhile, Apple’s another contract manufacturer, Salcomp, has plans to double its headcount in India to 25,000 by 2026 as it ramps up operations in the country.

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