Apple isn't actually prevented from selling either new or refurbished iPhones in India. What it appears that they cannot do, though, is open any Apple Stores there, because they don't (or can't) comply with a rule that "at least 30 per cent of the value of procurement of manufactured/processed products shall be sourced from Indian small industries" (from a similar story about Walmart: http://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/30-local-sourcing-...)
It looks like what they wanted to do was to manufacture the original phones in China, as always, but do the refurbishment in India, and thereby call the refurbished phones "locally sourced". If they could do that, then they could run their own stores in the country, assuming that the refurb phones made up 30% of their product.
The Indian government rejected that idea, so I presume that Apple will need to continue selling through third-party retail stores, or come up with another way to comply with the rule.
Is there some kind of law in India against selling used phones? Or was this an arbitrary decision by the commerce and industry ministry? I guess I don't see what the big deal is (and the article isn't clear to me).
India has a law that a seller must source at least 30% of a product from intra-India businesses in order to do business in India.
In my opinion, this is a very intelligent law. It's goal is to induce industry in India and limit (predatory/highly desired) products that remove wealth from the country, a country that needs desperately work for it's people.
It is actually the other way around. Internal producers simply cannot compete with external ones who can produce in multiple countries, in giant quantities at very low overhead cost and then sell reject goods for a very low price.
Africa has a big problem with this. Due to trade agreements, many European meat producers sell their "leftovers" into the African market at extremely low costs, which has lead to the demise of domestic producers of live stock. Which then resulted in a loss of jobs.
Yes, some people might be able to purchase things at a lower cost now, but some other people will loose their jobs and won't be able to purchase anything at all, which also negatively affects the domestic market.
For the outside producer is not a problem, they simply can move on. But kick starting a domestic market and bringing wages back up again will be huge issue for any government in the long run.
This is a common argument but it always seems to assume that the value of increased sales to specific group of producers is somehow more important than value of the competing goods to the disbursed group of consumers.
Specific groups of producers seem to always be able to influence government policies in their favor while the disbursed interests of everyone else get discounted.
And just to be clear, I'm not talking specifically about India, this phenomena is common everywhere.
There are more factors than just goods and sales though, like the independence and autonomy of the country/community, it's level of infrastructure, social development, etc. Local producers can help with those factors, while foreign producers dumping reject goods won't.
Of course there are other factors. But that doesn't mean the dispersed interest of consumers should be valued at zero just because they don't have a lobbyist and no one donates to a politicians campaign after explaining how they should let Apple sell used iPhones.
Why would such a law work better economically than trade barriers in general? The net effect in this specific case seems to be an effective tax on the Indian consumer who would be happy with a refurbished iPhone 5S.
What's a predatory product? That seems silly to me: people only buy something when they value what they get more than what they give up to get it. And how does it remove wealth from a country? Allowing people to satisfy their desires in the most direct way possible doesn't seem in conflict with the goal of creating wealth, so I'm honestly finding it hard to understand your reasoning here.
I would argue that any form of trade protectionism is not intelligent: it's very short-sighted and sacrifices actual wealth for employment. It's the type of thing that sounded and felt good to me only before I actually tried to learn a bit of economics.
Think of it in terms of a small town that passed a law banning any form of trade between residents. Technically, 100% of people would be employed. They would be employed knitting their own sweaters, milking their own cows, growing their own grain, cooking their own food, gathering their own building materials, pumping their own water, etc. So life would be paradise with 100% employment right? Without trade, people would be on the edge of starvation and extreme poverty constantly. Scale up that analogy to put the residents of that small town as countries, and you can see where protectionist policies protect jobs at the expense of actual prosperity. North Korea is an imperfect extreme example, but you can easily see what effects limiting trade has on prosperity.
If I was a politician, I'd love to pass all kind of trade policies like this because most people haven't really studied economics so it's easy to spin up your consolidation of power as protecting jobs.
I'm not going to argue the whether protectionism is a good thing in general but a predatory doesn't mean that it's not worth it to the buyer, but that the profits of the sale leave the country.
As an extreme example, if your country exports nothing but you have citizens buying goods from other countries then over time the country is going to become poorer and poorer as the capital flows out of the country.
Free trade is good for regions with industry and when workers have the means to relocate to areas with employment. Until our immigration policy is indistinguishable from 'we're all basically one country' then trade protections are going to sometimes be a country's best option.
>I would argue that any form of trade protectionism is not intelligent: it's very short-sighted and sacrifices actual wealth for employment. It's the type of thing that sounded and felt good to me only before I actually tried to learn a bit of economics.
Frankly I think you're only part way through your stages of view development, and currently on a very common one for people who've learned "a bit of economics" but not yet delved much deeper. There are a couple of initial issues with your argument (which themselves rapidly spiral into far more complexity) once it reaches the real world.
The first is that when labeling protectionism "not intelligent" you're failing to consider geopolitical and domestic realities. We do not have one world government, and there exist extremely genuine diametrically opposing views on proper governance amongst the world's sovereign nation-states. Trade between nations does not exist in a vacuum, leaders have a responsibility to at least consider future strategic priorities, how relations with a given nation may evolve in the future, whether trade will be strategically positive or not and in what industries, etc. Influence by focused interests, regulatory capture, and so forth are all serious issues that you correctly identify as economically destructive, and on the whole trade should be a huge net win. But that doesn't mean that all political concerns are unfounded, or that trade cannot be destructive longer term in some cases.
On the domestic front, there have objectively been major issues with how the gains from trade have been distributed to populations. We can talk average net wins, but individuals are not entirely averages and the human factor must be taken into account. Simple classical economics often tends to treat humans as far more fungible and fluid then they actually are. Actual humans cannot necessarily simply switch jobs easily (or at all) into an entirely different field if their area of expertise is obsoleted, and while most systems can handle tiny numbers alright a significant enough shift can result in political unrest and a negative effect for the country, even if theoretically the country is "richer" for it. Now, there are certainly more and less efficient ways to deal with this. Ideally, a strong retraining system and some sort of electronic basic income combined with proper taxation would allow the gains to be spread out to some extent and enhance the ability to shift jobs, reducing the problem of those who lost out sufficiently. In practice this may not be politically or technically feasible for a given government at a given time, leaving cruder and less efficient measures up to and including pure protectionism. But don't confuse a negative, even a significant negative, vs an ideal with an absolute negative vs other goals.
Whether the second issue applies depends on what exactly you're including in the basket of "any form of trade protectionism". It's common for economists arguing for pure Free Trade to include in this any sort of regulation or tariffs whatsoever, particularly if they could "benefit" domestic suppliers over foreigns ones even if that is not the specific goal. Here the problem is that that view puts Free Trade in direct conflict with the Free Market and sovereign cultural goal making, and the Free Market in particular is one of our most powerful and successful economic tools. Remember, a Free Market is a specific construct that requires certain foundations, and that it's also then up to a polity to decide exactly what sort of goals they want to optimize efficiency towards (and in turn other baselines). Foundations include things like information symmetry and cost internalization. Different countries can and do have radically different policies there, so if trade between them is not normalized then it will tend to be artificially destructive towards the markets one or both. Cost internalization is a simple example: if one country has a so...
30% sourcing of products from India is a requirement to start single brand retail stores in India. The ban on import of used phones is with some other law.
India has a rule that you can sell pre used phone here which are not imported. In other words, you cannot export used phones here and sell them. These used phones must have been bought new here.
All foreign retailers run into this problem entering India. Ikea has been building factories so they can start sourcing from India in order to comply. Moving their production out of Pakistan and Bangladesh into India in order to comply to tackle the bigger market.
Foreign owned businesses need to stock 30% or more of products sourced from India.
Hardly any economists -- who are trained in analyzing these proposals -- agree with this sentiment.
There are significant second-order effects of protectionism that are harmful yet not well understood by politicians or voters: retribution by other trading partners, increased prices and inflation are but a few.
Yeah, its a protectionist policy. It impossible to understand if IKEA having to open 3 factories in India is a larger GDP infusion than them not having to, but being able to redirect that capital at opening 80 stores and employing 8000 people vs 3 factories of 3000 people and 3 stores for another 3000 (these numbers are from my ass, just trying to make an example).
This is really horrible news for Apple. According to this article [1], their sales volume fell from 55% to 37% in India in the first 1/4. Meanwhile, Samsung goes from 35% to 62%.
Selling used iPhones there would have allowed them to dramatically increase sale volume in the low-end market which could have helped them regain some ground.
This really was a great plan and I hope Apple can make it work.
With the iPhone Upgrade Program, Americans can finance a new unlocked phone with 0% interest, reducing the cell carrier lock-in. After 12 months, you can exchange your old phone for a new one.
Now, Apple has millions of 12 month old, last gen phones. India requires 30% of products sold to be sourced in India, so Apple planned to refurbish these used iPhones in India and then sell them in market.
It really was a great way to get Americans to upgrade more often, reduce the power of American cell companies, and provide an affordable product to an emerging market.
Apparently refurbishing the phones in India isn't enough to satisfy the 30% rule.
> It really was a great way to get Americans to upgrade more often
I cringe in fear when I read this line. The voracious appetite and the unwavering focus on economic growth is hurting the entire world. Isn't it a time to step back and rethink our long term strategy as one species?
I routinely board very large airplanes without having the vaguest idea of how they work or how to fly them - I'm a passenger, and happy to ride along. I take buses, and taxis, and ride shotgun when others drive, without sweating it. But put me behind the wheels of the car, and I suddenly need to know a whole lot more. Manual or automatic? Mirros adjusted right? Where is the knob for the headlights? Emergency break, just in case? Where I buy a new car, I actually do skim over the manual.
...
A reporter called recently and asked how long it would take Earth to "forget" humanity if we suddenly disappeared. In some sense, we are now unforgettable - the human-caused plant and animal extinctions have emptied biological "jobs" and that will be filled over many millions of years by creatures who will owe their existence to use wiping out the competition. We have pumped oil and gas out of the ground that had been there for hundreds of millions of years, through holes that may not be eroded away for additional hundreds of millions of years. The human "layer" of plastic and aluminum foil and heavy metals may be recognizable in sedimentary piles hundreds of millions of years from now.
...
With the among of stuff we use, and the amount of the world we occupy, we are no longer passengers napping in the back seat of the car. We are everywhere, and changing everything. Hence many environmental scientists are now involved in figuring out what we are doing, how to operate a remarkably complex and involved Earth system, and how to make the ride as enjoyable as possible.
I'm concerned that a lot of people, including some of those whow are making laws, still think that they are sitting in the back of the car, looking our the window and enjoying the ride.
- 'Earth - The Operators' Manual' By Richard B. Alley
Perhaps the real lesson here is that buying a brand-new device every 12 months isn't sustainable. It seems like such a tremendous waste of resources that the assumed behaviour for so many is to re-buy a device based solely on the idea that it is newer.
They're not saying Apple can't sell used phones or that Indians can't buy and use used phones.
All that's happening is that Apple can't classify their refurbished phones into a regulatory category they would like to classify them as.
The fact this "news" source made that misinterpretation possible in the first place means they knew the story was boring. So they made it vague in a way that you wound assume the wrong thing.
If you don't want to read further than the headline then don't read further than the headline. But you seem curious to know more so maybe you should read further than the headline.
Yes, but not having a single correct price doesn't mean that something can't be considered overpriced. A bottle of water sold at 2.5 million dollars would probably be considered overpriced by most people.
To understand the insanity behind the Economic Policies of India, I recommend people to read "The turn of the tortoise" by T.N.Ninan. An eye opening and honest view from financial/economic point of view.
Some salient points are,
- Indian Government acts paternalistic (at times with good intentions) but becomes parasitical in practice.
- Indian corruption is rent-seeking unlike some high growth nations where corruption is more like profit sharing
- India is a Center-Left country, with Fabian Socialism as the default political mindset, so Price controls and market control is the favorite practice of protectionism and fountainhead of black and gray markets.
I strongly recommend, whether you are Indian or interested in India.
I don't have a large sample size but here's an interesting anecdote: India's largest phone manufacturer had to set up operations in Taiwan to buy fully functional phones, open them up and reassemble them in India: here's details + an interview where the CEO mentioned this story:
http://blog.shriphani.com/2016/05/26/the-lunacy-of-the-apple...
It is almost as if the nation has internalized its mediocrity and decision-making is overly focused on potential losses.
India is a huge market for mobile phones. There are 400 mn+ smartphone users here.
1. Why should the government allow someone to come and sell old phones ?
2. These phones would have lesser shelf life and once they become bricks, India would need infrastructure to recycle these. In absence of this infra, it may lead to more pollution.
3. Why doesn't APPL reduces price of their mobile phones to bring it to the level where it can compete with other players ? Samsung, Lenovo, HTC, Xiomi etc are doing very well here. They price phones competitively and some even make phones here. They do not need to sell refurbished phones. Their phones are better spec'd and have more relevant features compared to iphone.
Tim cook, on his recent visit to India, admitted that iphone is indeed mispriced in India. In my view this is very good decision by the government. You must understand more about the topic at hand than putting that passive aggresive comment here
You would have to prove that assertion. Or at-least make a case beyond the superficial level.
Like the parent poster said, India doesn't want to turn itself into a e-waste dump for the world. Such a situation would be bad for its citizens as the older phones need to be recycled/processed.
All countries should try to protect their interest and markets. I am happy that Apple got a push back by Indian government. Can you explain in words Apple's action when it is parking Billion dollar fortune outside USA? It pretty much sounds like 'practice of protectionism' from USA itself.
Agreeing to all the whims and fancies of western companies is something governments should never do. In my view free market is propaganda by these companies to make these kinds of restrictions feel dirty. Before you attack me, hear me out.
China has many such restrictions on many such products. China blocked out internet and internet companies, which resulted in home grown products emerging and becoming really successful (alibaba, tencent, baidu, didi etc). Indian government did not put any such restriction on virtual products. This has resulted in Google, facebook and microsoft having literal monopoly on the market. There are some restrictions for companies like Amazon and Uber. This has resulted in a healthy local competition and ecosystem to develop and compete with international competition like Uber and Amazon. In the end, some of these local companies won't survive independently and got bought by international players. This, in my view, is a much better outcome as this makes international players to entrench heavily and invest in the local market.
Lets look at telecom, banks and airlines. Govt discouraged entry of foreign players into Indian markets by making rules of entry tighter. This has resulted in companies like Airtel, Idea, Reliance and Tata to become strong players in telecom. Believe me, Indian telecom sector has lowest tariff in the world and has really huge reach with more than 850mn subscribers. These companies have innovated and made sure that global competition did not kill them. Sure some companies got bought by likes of Vodafone. However, companies like Airtel managed to go global.
In banks, none of the foreign players have managed to pickup any significant market share in view of healthy competition by private Indian banks like HDFC and ICICI. In airlines, again, government disallowed foreign players. They have to be content with buying large chunks of really successful Indian homegrown players.
Lets look at mobile phone market. Indian government did not put a barrier for phones to be imported. They just blocked second hand phones by slapping a large anti dumping duty. This has resulted in virtually zero production of these mobile phones. With more than 400 mn smartphone users, who lost by letting big smartphone makers to import ? No Indian homegrown industry, no ecosystem. All they managed to do is to make sure all these phones where new and not refurbished.
I strongly believe that big countries like India, should have some sort of protectionism in the infancy stage of an industry. When you have strong local competition, only then these markets should be opened up for global competition. If the local competition that has managed to sprout is capable it will ward off global competition and establish a healthy equilibria. If not, global competition would rule the market and that should be fine. Point being, give local ecosystem a chance. By letting Apple sell second hand phones, India would open itself up to be dumping ground of the world. Soon enough all end of life phones would end up in India masquerading as refubrished.
58 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 87.6 ms ] threadhttp://www.livemint.com/Companies/lDn53REhqvhqGoIxs9MgwJ/App...
Apple isn't actually prevented from selling either new or refurbished iPhones in India. What it appears that they cannot do, though, is open any Apple Stores there, because they don't (or can't) comply with a rule that "at least 30 per cent of the value of procurement of manufactured/processed products shall be sourced from Indian small industries" (from a similar story about Walmart: http://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/30-local-sourcing-...)
It looks like what they wanted to do was to manufacture the original phones in China, as always, but do the refurbishment in India, and thereby call the refurbished phones "locally sourced". If they could do that, then they could run their own stores in the country, assuming that the refurb phones made up 30% of their product.
The Indian government rejected that idea, so I presume that Apple will need to continue selling through third-party retail stores, or come up with another way to comply with the rule.
Ford, Hyndai, GM, Toyota are all car companies. They're used to dealing with local production requirements.
In my opinion, this is a very intelligent law. It's goal is to induce industry in India and limit (predatory/highly desired) products that remove wealth from the country, a country that needs desperately work for it's people.
Africa has a big problem with this. Due to trade agreements, many European meat producers sell their "leftovers" into the African market at extremely low costs, which has lead to the demise of domestic producers of live stock. Which then resulted in a loss of jobs.
Yes, some people might be able to purchase things at a lower cost now, but some other people will loose their jobs and won't be able to purchase anything at all, which also negatively affects the domestic market.
For the outside producer is not a problem, they simply can move on. But kick starting a domestic market and bringing wages back up again will be huge issue for any government in the long run.
Specific groups of producers seem to always be able to influence government policies in their favor while the disbursed interests of everyone else get discounted.
And just to be clear, I'm not talking specifically about India, this phenomena is common everywhere.
I would argue that any form of trade protectionism is not intelligent: it's very short-sighted and sacrifices actual wealth for employment. It's the type of thing that sounded and felt good to me only before I actually tried to learn a bit of economics.
Think of it in terms of a small town that passed a law banning any form of trade between residents. Technically, 100% of people would be employed. They would be employed knitting their own sweaters, milking their own cows, growing their own grain, cooking their own food, gathering their own building materials, pumping their own water, etc. So life would be paradise with 100% employment right? Without trade, people would be on the edge of starvation and extreme poverty constantly. Scale up that analogy to put the residents of that small town as countries, and you can see where protectionist policies protect jobs at the expense of actual prosperity. North Korea is an imperfect extreme example, but you can easily see what effects limiting trade has on prosperity.
If I was a politician, I'd love to pass all kind of trade policies like this because most people haven't really studied economics so it's easy to spin up your consolidation of power as protecting jobs.
As an extreme example, if your country exports nothing but you have citizens buying goods from other countries then over time the country is going to become poorer and poorer as the capital flows out of the country.
Free trade is good for regions with industry and when workers have the means to relocate to areas with employment. Until our immigration policy is indistinguishable from 'we're all basically one country' then trade protections are going to sometimes be a country's best option.
Frankly I think you're only part way through your stages of view development, and currently on a very common one for people who've learned "a bit of economics" but not yet delved much deeper. There are a couple of initial issues with your argument (which themselves rapidly spiral into far more complexity) once it reaches the real world.
The first is that when labeling protectionism "not intelligent" you're failing to consider geopolitical and domestic realities. We do not have one world government, and there exist extremely genuine diametrically opposing views on proper governance amongst the world's sovereign nation-states. Trade between nations does not exist in a vacuum, leaders have a responsibility to at least consider future strategic priorities, how relations with a given nation may evolve in the future, whether trade will be strategically positive or not and in what industries, etc. Influence by focused interests, regulatory capture, and so forth are all serious issues that you correctly identify as economically destructive, and on the whole trade should be a huge net win. But that doesn't mean that all political concerns are unfounded, or that trade cannot be destructive longer term in some cases.
On the domestic front, there have objectively been major issues with how the gains from trade have been distributed to populations. We can talk average net wins, but individuals are not entirely averages and the human factor must be taken into account. Simple classical economics often tends to treat humans as far more fungible and fluid then they actually are. Actual humans cannot necessarily simply switch jobs easily (or at all) into an entirely different field if their area of expertise is obsoleted, and while most systems can handle tiny numbers alright a significant enough shift can result in political unrest and a negative effect for the country, even if theoretically the country is "richer" for it. Now, there are certainly more and less efficient ways to deal with this. Ideally, a strong retraining system and some sort of electronic basic income combined with proper taxation would allow the gains to be spread out to some extent and enhance the ability to shift jobs, reducing the problem of those who lost out sufficiently. In practice this may not be politically or technically feasible for a given government at a given time, leaving cruder and less efficient measures up to and including pure protectionism. But don't confuse a negative, even a significant negative, vs an ideal with an absolute negative vs other goals.
Whether the second issue applies depends on what exactly you're including in the basket of "any form of trade protectionism". It's common for economists arguing for pure Free Trade to include in this any sort of regulation or tariffs whatsoever, particularly if they could "benefit" domestic suppliers over foreigns ones even if that is not the specific goal. Here the problem is that that view puts Free Trade in direct conflict with the Free Market and sovereign cultural goal making, and the Free Market in particular is one of our most powerful and successful economic tools. Remember, a Free Market is a specific construct that requires certain foundations, and that it's also then up to a polity to decide exactly what sort of goals they want to optimize efficiency towards (and in turn other baselines). Foundations include things like information symmetry and cost internalization. Different countries can and do have radically different policies there, so if trade between them is not normalized then it will tend to be artificially destructive towards the markets one or both. Cost internalization is a simple example: if one country has a so...
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1843310279
The same policy implemented here would be great to rebuild our crumbling economy and get money flowing.
There are significant second-order effects of protectionism that are harmful yet not well understood by politicians or voters: retribution by other trading partners, increased prices and inflation are but a few.
Ok, then conversely, which companies have chosen not to comply? Would that mean the policy is a huge failure?
Selling used iPhones there would have allowed them to dramatically increase sale volume in the low-end market which could have helped them regain some ground.
[1]: http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/gadgets/samsung-...
With the iPhone Upgrade Program, Americans can finance a new unlocked phone with 0% interest, reducing the cell carrier lock-in. After 12 months, you can exchange your old phone for a new one.
Now, Apple has millions of 12 month old, last gen phones. India requires 30% of products sold to be sourced in India, so Apple planned to refurbish these used iPhones in India and then sell them in market.
It really was a great way to get Americans to upgrade more often, reduce the power of American cell companies, and provide an affordable product to an emerging market.
Apparently refurbishing the phones in India isn't enough to satisfy the 30% rule.
I cringe in fear when I read this line. The voracious appetite and the unwavering focus on economic growth is hurting the entire world. Isn't it a time to step back and rethink our long term strategy as one species?
I routinely board very large airplanes without having the vaguest idea of how they work or how to fly them - I'm a passenger, and happy to ride along. I take buses, and taxis, and ride shotgun when others drive, without sweating it. But put me behind the wheels of the car, and I suddenly need to know a whole lot more. Manual or automatic? Mirros adjusted right? Where is the knob for the headlights? Emergency break, just in case? Where I buy a new car, I actually do skim over the manual.
...
A reporter called recently and asked how long it would take Earth to "forget" humanity if we suddenly disappeared. In some sense, we are now unforgettable - the human-caused plant and animal extinctions have emptied biological "jobs" and that will be filled over many millions of years by creatures who will owe their existence to use wiping out the competition. We have pumped oil and gas out of the ground that had been there for hundreds of millions of years, through holes that may not be eroded away for additional hundreds of millions of years. The human "layer" of plastic and aluminum foil and heavy metals may be recognizable in sedimentary piles hundreds of millions of years from now.
...
With the among of stuff we use, and the amount of the world we occupy, we are no longer passengers napping in the back seat of the car. We are everywhere, and changing everything. Hence many environmental scientists are now involved in figuring out what we are doing, how to operate a remarkably complex and involved Earth system, and how to make the ride as enjoyable as possible.
I'm concerned that a lot of people, including some of those whow are making laws, still think that they are sitting in the back of the car, looking our the window and enjoying the ride.
- 'Earth - The Operators' Manual' By Richard B. Alley
The only people this benefits are apple stockholders. Why not build a device intended to last years?
These aren't you cars, these are chips which could'nt care or show effect of being n-handed.
All that's happening is that Apple can't classify their refurbished phones into a regulatory category they would like to classify them as.
The fact this "news" source made that misinterpretation possible in the first place means they knew the story was boring. So they made it vague in a way that you wound assume the wrong thing.
Edit: looks like iclelland explained it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11822713
There is no single 'correct' price for anything because everybody values things differently.
Some salient points are,
- Indian Government acts paternalistic (at times with good intentions) but becomes parasitical in practice.
- Indian corruption is rent-seeking unlike some high growth nations where corruption is more like profit sharing
- India is a Center-Left country, with Fabian Socialism as the default political mindset, so Price controls and market control is the favorite practice of protectionism and fountainhead of black and gray markets.
I strongly recommend, whether you are Indian or interested in India.
This made curious, and interested. Could you please expand more on this?
How are they different? Why this specific kind happens more on India than other countries?
It is almost as if the nation has internalized its mediocrity and decision-making is overly focused on potential losses.
Tim cook, on his recent visit to India, admitted that iphone is indeed mispriced in India. In my view this is very good decision by the government. You must understand more about the topic at hand than putting that passive aggresive comment here
For the reason that pretty much all other countries allow it - that it benefits the buyer and seller?
You would have to prove that assertion. Or at-least make a case beyond the superficial level.
Like the parent poster said, India doesn't want to turn itself into a e-waste dump for the world. Such a situation would be bad for its citizens as the older phones need to be recycled/processed.
China has many such restrictions on many such products. China blocked out internet and internet companies, which resulted in home grown products emerging and becoming really successful (alibaba, tencent, baidu, didi etc). Indian government did not put any such restriction on virtual products. This has resulted in Google, facebook and microsoft having literal monopoly on the market. There are some restrictions for companies like Amazon and Uber. This has resulted in a healthy local competition and ecosystem to develop and compete with international competition like Uber and Amazon. In the end, some of these local companies won't survive independently and got bought by international players. This, in my view, is a much better outcome as this makes international players to entrench heavily and invest in the local market.
Lets look at telecom, banks and airlines. Govt discouraged entry of foreign players into Indian markets by making rules of entry tighter. This has resulted in companies like Airtel, Idea, Reliance and Tata to become strong players in telecom. Believe me, Indian telecom sector has lowest tariff in the world and has really huge reach with more than 850mn subscribers. These companies have innovated and made sure that global competition did not kill them. Sure some companies got bought by likes of Vodafone. However, companies like Airtel managed to go global.
In banks, none of the foreign players have managed to pickup any significant market share in view of healthy competition by private Indian banks like HDFC and ICICI. In airlines, again, government disallowed foreign players. They have to be content with buying large chunks of really successful Indian homegrown players.
Lets look at mobile phone market. Indian government did not put a barrier for phones to be imported. They just blocked second hand phones by slapping a large anti dumping duty. This has resulted in virtually zero production of these mobile phones. With more than 400 mn smartphone users, who lost by letting big smartphone makers to import ? No Indian homegrown industry, no ecosystem. All they managed to do is to make sure all these phones where new and not refurbished.
I strongly believe that big countries like India, should have some sort of protectionism in the infancy stage of an industry. When you have strong local competition, only then these markets should be opened up for global competition. If the local competition that has managed to sprout is capable it will ward off global competition and establish a healthy equilibria. If not, global competition would rule the market and that should be fine. Point being, give local ecosystem a chance. By letting Apple sell second hand phones, India would open itself up to be dumping ground of the world. Soon enough all end of life phones would end up in India masquerading as refubrished.