This is a rather hot topic, as many EU customers are already complaining about the higher price of Mac on this side of the Atlantic, when compared to USA; especially considering that we are closer to the assembling lines located in China... The way our Mac get more expensive might not only be associated with the weird way Apple is calculating the USD/EURO rate, but also the distribution channel:
- Apple sells hardware to its Apple Europe subsidiary in USD.
- Apple Europe resells in EURO (or Pounds for UK) to large distributors and generate a margin. Each distributor generates another margin by selling those Mac to APR.
- Profit generated by Apple Europe are then changed back in USA and sent back to Apple, to be included in the company's financial report.
It is quite clear that this strategy with doubling currency change as well as adding one step in the distribution channel can be important when it is time to generate profit. This could be explain why Apple Europe systematically use a very conservative (and highly profitable) USD/EURO rate. With the recent tension in Greece, the USD moved from 0.67 Euro to 0.73, bringing the price of our Mac in Europe almost in line with the one in USA. Of course, this will have a strong (negative) impact on Apple Europe profit for the corresponding quarter, and might push them to revise prices of models as soon as they are updated. We can expect again a +10% additional margin over the average currency rate.
