The products include iPod Shuffle, Nano, and Classic. The Touch model will be available in October on the Romanian market. IRIS estimates €12 million worth of Apple products sales in 2007, double year-on-year. Sales also rose by 100 percent in 2006 from 2005. “We have already registered a high demand for the new iPods so we have made a large order, but the low volume of this entire market sets our priorities on the Western European markets,” said Catalin Boaru, Marketing Manager of IRIS. The company is distributing the iPod series, which generates 40 percent of IRIS’s annual net sales, the iMac series (workstations), and Macbook (portables), the latter two exceeding €7 mln in sales.
Portables made up for 45 percent of total units sold in 2006, with Macbook, this year’s star, expected to represent more than 60 percent. One year after it was launched, the online Apple shop generates 5 percent of the company’s total net sales and 75 percent of the orders come from outside Bucharest.
“Apple is for computers what BMW is for cars. BMW say that their car is just like any other but it gives its owners the unique BMW feeling. The same thing can be said about Apple: it is an average computer, but it is one of a kind,” said Viorel Nastase, Direct Sales Manager of IRIS.
Nastase is coordinating IRIS’s newest initiative, corporate sales, which intend to introduce the Apple brand in Romania’s largest companies. Apple’s traditional corporate clients in Romania are companies operating in the media, advertising and web design fields.
“We are aware of the fact that a migration from PC to Macs at organizational infrastructure level is difficult as it involves a series of collateral costs and especially a strategic decision,” Nastase added, while conducting a program destined to make Apple computers popular among large companies employees.
