Product Department Manager Apple Middle East, while in GITEX, Dubai.
Hello Mr. Bendali, thank you for volunteering to share your views with faq-mac.com, the most famous mac news network in the Spanish language.
My pleasure.

[1]

So what exactly do you do at Apple?
Well I work for Arab Business Machines, Apple's branch here in the Middle East, as the Product Department Manager.

How would you say Apple is doing in this region right now?
Well, we are doing quite fine, I mean if you took some shots out in the stand you would see that we have quite a lot of people, a nice crowd for this type of event, with lots of people exhibiting our products. We are really strong in some areas, such as the video market, which is one of our growing and strongest markets at the moment.

Is Apple ME doing any type of advertising in order to make people switch to this amazing and more powerful platform?
Well, we adopted a seminar-centric kind of approach. We do a lot of seminars, a lot of activities directly with our clientele and we also do some small advertising in specific magazines but never in a general form such as it’s done in the US, for example we promote DVD Studio Pro in digital video magazines.

By advertising we always try to target people that we focus on in general.

How about education, because as we all know in the United States there is a big market share coming from that specific market and it seems to be extremely important for Apple, is that happening in the Middle East as well?
Yeah actually we are quite strong in the Middle East in the education market, we are getting stronger every day, we are very satisfied with our market share in the higher education fields, we also have very good share among the private sector here in Dubai, as well as school and universities but not that strong in the public and government sector. We are trying to push as much as possible in the public.

[2]

Is the recent introduction of the PowerMac G5 going to change things in any way?
We are glad now that we have one of the most powerful machines in the world, so we hope this is going to change things, yes definitely.

Have you received a lot of orders from individuals in this region?
We actually have quite a few orders already done for personal purposes, we even got an order for a Dual G5 with a 23 inch Cinema Display from one of the universities in town so we are quite proud of that, but for individuals we just started getting these orders, we've only shipped a few mainly because of all the machines we had reserved for the show so we managed to ship all the ones that were available to our power customers.

[3]

Are businesses adopting Apple's technology since it is got UNIX already built in to the operating system plus other tons of extras that come with Mac OS X Server?
Yeah, our server market we can say that it grew a lot, it went from almost inexistent to something that we can start talking about. Our sales are growing each quarter, again we sold XServes to the areas we are good at such as publishing houses and education, however what we are now more concerned about is to gain more market share on those markets where they don’t usually buy Apple as a server, yet still they might be interested in the UNIX capabilities of this particular server system.

Alright, thanks a lot from the whole faq-mac.com team, we really appreciate it.
You are most welcome.

Interview by Mike
More videos of GITEX here [4]