TeliaSonera signs for iPhone in 7 countries: Another domino falls: Russia and China remain

TeliaSonera, the Stockholm-based network operator, will offer Apple Inc.’s iPhone this year to some portion of the 115 million subscribers it covers in seven countries, the operator said yesterday in a one-sentence announcement.
Those countries include Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
The announcement leaves Russia and China as the two largest markets without any official iPhone offerings, though the gray market has since last year provided unlocked iPhones to most advanced markets around the globe.
The litany of network operator announcements over the past month appears to bring more than a half-billion subscribers worldwide within Apple’s reach as the company prepares to launch a new version of the device.
Speculation on the new iteration includes features such as 3G and GPS, plus extended battery life to support 3G. Lack of 3G has been cited as one factor slowing European uptake of the device.
The long list of new operators and markets for the iPhone appeared to indicate that Apple has changed its business model for dealing with network operators by no longer providing exclusive access to the device in exchange for a slice of resulting data revenue. That condition has been cited in news reports of failed negotiations with China Mobile, whose executives have said the Chinese operator would not share data revenue.
Apple may also allow its operator partners to subsidize the device to juice sales and jump-start increased data revenue for the operators. Rumors to that effect appeared to get some backing from AT&T’s CFO Rick Lindner on May 22 at a Reuters conference in New York, as reported by Fortune, when Lindner described in general terms the effective use of subsidies as applied to other, high-end devices such as those from Research In Motion Ltd.
Speculation has focused on the possibility that AT&T Mobility would subsidize the iPhone from its current price at $400 (8 GB) and $500 (16 GB) down to $200, well below many smartphones on the market. The conventional wisdom is that such a price break would accelerate iPhone sales so that Apple can achieve its stated goal of selling 10 million units in the 18 months from the device’s launch to the end of 2008. If operators worldwide followed suit, the company might well exceed its goal.
But a subsidy at that level would undercut the sense among wireless device vendors that the iPhone’s greatest contribution to the industry was its influence in resetting the value proposition for advanced devices.