We want to launch Apple Pay in India, says SVP Eddy Cue

Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president for internet software and services, overseas the American giant’s content portfolio from iTunes stores, Apple Music, Apple Maps, Apple Pay among other things. Cue, who joined Apple in 1989 and reports into CEO Tim Cook, was on a whirlwind tour of India where he hosted a bunch of Bollywood stars and announced the setting up of two Mac Labs at AR Rahman’s K M Music Conservatories. In an interview with ET, Cue spoke about what bought him to India and his plans on the content front:

Edited Excerpt:

You met half of Bollywood a few days ago. What was the idea?
We are very heavily involved with them in music and Apple Music. There’s a lot more that we want to do with music in India. Secondly, there is a lot we want to do with brining Indian music outside to the rest of the world. We have been working with new artists and existing artists to do that. More importantly, we wanted to announce the work we are doing with AR (Rahman) on the KM Music conservatory with kids. It was great to set up a couple of labs with all the Apple equipment, creating from scholarships.

Are you looking at other creative collaborations with Bollywood? You’ve announced a tie-up with Steven Spielberg to bring back ‘Amazing Stories’
A couple of months ago, we had announced that we had hired Zack (Van Amburg) and Jamie (Erlicht) from Sony Television to head up our video work in Los Angeles. We are just getting started with that. I am not going to talk about what we are doing there because its still early. But certainly, Bollywood is as good at creating content as anybody else around the world. And I am sure we will do things here because it’s a great film and entertainment market.

What do you see as the future of television? People are talking of post cable networks in the US…
If you look at the US population today, the vast majority get their television from cable and satellite subscribers, it’s gone down a little but it’s still a vast majority. Some additional services have come in and have augmented that but that hasn’t changed the majority — yet. If you and I are sitting here and talking about what’s going to happen in the next 10 years, it’s hard for me to imagine that will be the case. I don’t know if it’s three years, five years or ten years, but it will change. Which means there will be more opportunities, people are watching more content on our devices.

You’ve rolled out student subscriptions for Apple Music in India. What else do you plan to get more people on Apple Music – especially the younger crowd?
There are three things. One, is the economic point: you do that through student discounts and family subscriptions. Second, you need to do something with the content, which is helping them discover new artists, helping them discover new music around it. Third, you do some creative, innovative things with them, like with Harry Styles we did a ‘making of’ video (a documentary called ‘Behind the Album). Those are the ways in which you reach people. It’s always about the music first and then there are the features and functions that help.

How important is India for Apple from a content point of view? It’s obviously an important part of the phones and hardware business ?
I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think it was really important. Ultimately, it’s important because if you look at a lot of the things that I am in, I think the culture of India is perfect. We’ve spoken about music, about film, about entertainment…these are things that are part of India’s culture for many, many years. These are things that are part of my DNA. I think there is a huge opportunity in India. I also think of the opportunity as global. One there are Indian people all over the world. And two, they are discovering Indian music and Indian talent and Indian movies…and we knows how to do that really, really well too.

Let’s talk payments. Some of your competitors (Google, Samsung) have made an entry into that space. What are your plans?
We want to launch Apple Pay here but we don’t care about the payment mechanism itself. If you think about in US terms, we don’t care if it’s MasterCard, Visa or whatever or whatever bank you deal with. If you are in China, we don't care if it's WeChat pay or Alipay or credit card. It is great that all of these payment mechanisms is coming out in India because it empowers people to be able to pay. What Apple pay does is make that process easy, integrated and safe. We absolutely want to bring Apple pay to market here

What about Maps? What's happening on that front in India?
We are investing a tremendous amount. Maps is a critical app, especially with the things we do now, and the things we want to do in the future. So we wanted to expand and build in that area in a huge way. Because it is was something that was newer in a sense, we were able to pick and look at locations that we thought could help us do that. The advantage here is that you have a tremendous amount of talent in engineering skills which are hard to find anywhere in the world.

So, we thought this was a great opportunity. Other thing with maps it never ends. Maps is not a project that has an end date -- it changes everyday. We were excited about coming here because we heard a lot about the talent pool here, and have built an organization which has nearly 4000 people working on maps now.

The results have been better than what we could have expected. One, we have found that more talent available than we thought was. Two, the quality of the talent was significantly better than what we thought. Three, they have been incredible at learning and taking the Apple culture of being innovative and paying attention to detail while making a great product. Those aren't skills you can teach.

One of the criticisms of Apple is that India has been much of an afterthought in the past. Be it the launch of latest phones, or payments. Is it a valid criticism?
I think it is a valid criticism in the sense that, were we are thinking of India with all the features that we are providing: the answer is we didn't have all of them. So, it is valid from that sense. But that's why we are here. We are changing that in a huge way.
When you look at the products that we have, students discounts – those are things that wouldn’t have been in the past here, but now they are here on Day One. When you look at Apple music, the most aggressive price point is here in India. We have done that very uniquely in India. We expect and we are here for the long term to make sure that when we are building new products or enhancing existing products, we are thinking of India.

Apple has gone from a Computer to phone, to watches to now TV shows online ... where are you headed?
We never viewed ourselves as a PC, watch or phone company. We were always a company that created hardware and software. That's the skill set and the unique talent that we have. We have been evolving with just one exception to this is - to us technology alone is not enough, we need to have the arts part too. Our products are not views as just technology products. They touch people, they are emotional. People are tied to the products that we build.