Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, speaks in Brussels on October 24, 2018.
ARis Oikonomou | AFP | fake pictures
Apple CEO Tim Cook plans to tell the House Antimonopoly Subcommittee Wednesday that the company is competing fiercely with rivals in the smartphone market.
“The smartphone market is fiercely competitive, and companies like Samsung, LG, Huawei and Google have created very successful smartphone businesses that offer different approaches,” Cook said in prepared statements released by the committee. “Apple does not have a dominant market share in any market in which we do business.”
Cook is one of four technology CEOs to appear in Wednesday’s hearing. He will be joined by Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. All four CEOs issued prepared comments Tuesday night.
Cook’s prepared observations suggest that the company will largely employ a defense based on the fact that Apple does not have the majority of the smartphone market: only 46% of smartphones shipped to the US in the first quarter were from Apple, according to Counterpoint Research.
Apple faces criticism for its App Store, which is the only way to install consumer software on an iPhone. Detractors say the store has challenging and inconsistent rules, and that 30% of Apple’s digital transactions made through apps sold in the store is too high.
Cook plans to discuss the origins of the store, which was created in 2008, and the reasons why Apple maintains control over what remains in the App Store and what is not allowed. Detractors often say that Apple’s approach to software distribution is like a walled garden, and Apple is the gatekeeper.
“Clearly, if Apple is a gatekeeper, what we’ve done is open the widest gate. We want to have as many apps as we can in the store, not keep them away,” Cook said in the comments.
Cook will also defend the company’s 30% digital transaction fee on the App Store.
“Apple’s commissions are comparable to or less than the commissions charged by most of our competitors. And they are well below the 50 to 70 percent that software developers paid to distribute their work before launching the App Store,” Cook said. in prepared comments. .
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