A German court has ordered T-Mobile to change its marketing campaign for the Apple iPhone in the Europe cellphone market.
By: Ben Thompson
Published: Nov 20, 2007
Updated: Jul 2, 2009
Vodafone's German unit is behind the lawsuit which has issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting Apple from selling the iPhone. The international company asked the court to block sales of the iPhone in Germany until its complaints about an exclusive agreement between Apple and T-Mobile are addressed.
The court order does not demand T-Mobile stop selling the Apple iPhone altogether, but does, at least temporarily, ban the renowned company from selling them with a two-year contract. The court has mandated that the creative product be allowed to function on other carrier networks.
{slot15}Cellphone company Deutsche Telekom, the parent company of T-Mobile Deutschland, said that it reserves the right to claim irreversible damages from Vodafone, which tightly controls the second-largest wireless network in Germany. T-Mobile, with 34 million customers, is the largest there.
Avi Greengart, a wireless analyst at Current Analysis, said he figures the competitive world will know sooner or later the extent of the revenue-sharing agreements because Apple is a public company. Apple might not break out the service agreement revenues specifically, he said, but financial analysts can look into the original numbers to get a fairly close estimate.
In the U.S., handset makers need to work with wireless carriers to get broad distribution. Even so, in Europe that's not the case. Phones are typically unlocked. If not for service revenues, Greengart said, it would make much more sense to release the phones as broadly as possible in Europe and Asia.
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