... MONDAY, JANUARY 13, 2014 | INTERNATIONAL NEW YORK TIMES companies business 17 WITH From Flying Tomato to head of Shaun White Enterprises About half an hour into the Air & Style meeting, Mr. White said: ‘‘I’m in. Sounds cool.’’ Mr. Yokomoto said, ‘‘Welcome to Shaun White’s world.’’ Later that afternoon, Mr. White’s physical therapist assessed his ankle and rubbed him down. Then Mr. White spent 30 minutes doing sets of exercises like single-leg squats and catching a medicine ball thrown at him as he balanced on a wobble board. None of this provided the adrenaline rush of even a simple ollie. But Mr. White is not so young anymore. He is trying to take a deliberate approach, to rehab both his body and his life. Among his goals: to have stronger friendships. As he iced his ankle, he sounded poignant. ‘‘When you travel a lot, you don’t really get called for birthday parties, you don’t really get called when a friend moves apartments. It’s those subtle things where you’re like, ‘Oh, man, you didn’t think to call me for that?’ And it’s like: ‘Man, you’re never here. I never thought to call you.’’’ Mr. White is aware that his life is unusual. He also knows this is a problem. Part of Mr. Yokomoto’s job is to keep Mr. White on track while at the same time reminding him that everybody has hard times. ‘‘He’ll allude to some high-profile person and say, ‘I just got off the phone and they have bigger problems than you do, trust me,’’’ Mr. White said. He finds this therapeutic. ‘‘It’s like when you see a couple and you’re like: Why are they so happy? Why am I not? It’s funny. It’s nice to learn those things now.’’ SNOWBOARDER, FROM PAGE 1 nicer person — or at least seem like a better, nicer person — Mr. White asked his personal assistant, Lianne Cashin: ‘‘What’s his name? Jim?’’ Ms. Cashin nodded. Mr. White yelled to the groomer, ‘‘Jim, can you throw some snow up there?’’ Jim grabbed a shovel. Mr. White shouted, ‘‘Thanks, Jim!’’ Mr. White, who is 27, has been a professional snowboarder for 13 years and a professional skateboarder for 10. Like many former child stars, he seems older than his years, and he has passed through quite a few stages along the way. First there was White the prepubescent prodigy known as Future Boy. Then there was White the Flying Tomato, a redheaded late teenager and early 20-something, in full command of his extreme-sport powers. Less pleasantly, in recent years, there has also been White the unsympathetic moneybags who crashed his Lamborghini; White the selfish jerk who wouldn’t invite other snowboarders to train at the half-pipe Red Bull built for him in the lead-up to the 2010 Olympics; and White the overly enthusiastic partyer who was arrested for public intoxication following the 2012 wedding of the drummer for the Black Keys. The newest is White the polite, industrious chief executive of Shaun White Enterprises, the company that oversees his boys’ clothing line at Target; his sponsorship deals with Burton, Oakley and Stride gum; his partnership with GoPro cameras; his band, Bad Things, signed by Warner Bros. last spring; his training; and his life. Mr. White approaches his entrepreneurialism the way he does his snowboarding. ‘‘The whole strategizing thing is what does it for me,’’ he says. ‘‘I’m always thinking: Well, if this could happen, then that could happen. It’ll leave me in this position, it’ll create these opportunities.’’ TEAM EFFORT At Northstar, Mr. White buckled one boot into his snowboard and rode sidesaddle on a snowmobile up to the top of the slopestyle course. Thirty people accompanied him to the hill that day, including Bud Keene, his coach; a photographer from Burton who travels with Mr. White; a producer and two cameramen shooting a documentary about Mr. White that Mr. White himself was financing; six Northstar employees; a dozen members of the media; two P.R. people; and Mr. White’s four bandmates. At the top of the course, Mr. White pointed his board downhill, pumped his knees a few times to generate momentum, then flew off the lip for the first of two jumps and did a double cork (two flips and three and a half spins). As Mr. White’s body pinwheeled through the sky, Ms. Cashin fired up a grill to make his considerable entourage hamburgers and hot dogs for lunch. The addition of slopestyle to the 2014 Olympics has doubled the training pressure on Mr. White. Until this year’s Games, he competed in only one snowboarding event, the half-pipe, which he dominates — he won gold in 2006 and 2010. But Mr. White doesn’t dominate slopestyle. That honor belongs to Mark McMorris, the 20-year-old Canadian who has won the event in the past two X Games. Still, Mr. White is determined not to lose. After each run, he reviewed slow-motion video with Mr. Keene. Around 1 p.m., Ms. Cashin answered Mr. White’s phone and walked to the bottom of the course. A small scrum of boom mikes and cameras followed. Mr. White pulled off his goggles and helmet, wiped his sweaty brow and grabbed the phone. ‘‘Wow, thank you for the news!’’ he said. ‘‘That’s unreal. That’s huge. Huge!’’ REMEMBERING TO BE NICE JED JACOBSOHN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES Shaun White training at Northstar California, the ski resort near Lake Tahoe where he went in April to learn how to execute the difficult triple cork 1440 snowboarding maneuver. Mr. White hung up and faced the cameras. ‘‘We got NBC doing the one-hour prime-time show. That whole project I was just funding: We sold it! Prime time, baby!’’ Much congratulating ensued; several of the cameras recording the moment were doing so for the documentary whose sale Mr. White was celebrating. Mr. White has been phenomenally successful at branding and selling himself. After the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, Bloomberg listed him as the second-most powerful athlete in the world, behind Peyton Manning, the Denver Broncos quarterback. By the next year, he’d dropped, but only to eighth. Bloomberg’s ranking uses a formula that combines an athlete’s ranking in his sport, that sport’s popularity and the athlete’s endorsement deals and potential. On the most recent list, Mr. White was 27th — still impressive given that snowboarding and skateboarding are seldom televised. Mr. White is the only extreme-sports athlete ever to make the top 100. To maintain his dominance in Sochi and beyond, he will need to land that godforsaken triple cork. A STAR FROM EARLY ON Mr. White grew up in Southern California, near San Diego. His mother, Cathy, waited on tables; his father, Roger, worked for the San Clemente water department; Jesse, seven years older than Shaun, liked to ride a skateboard down a ramp that the family built in the backyard, flip through the air and land on the trampoline. (Mr. White also has a sister, Kari, who is two years older than he is.) Mr. White was born with a congenital heart defect known as tetralogy of Fallot and had two cardiac operations before he was 5. But once in good health, Mr. White followed Jesse everywhere — down the skate ramp onto the trampoline, onto skis, then onto a snowboard. By the time Mr. White turned 6, his parents had bought the van that Mr. White makes sure is part of the story that he relays to the world. The White family slept in the van at the base of the San Bernardino Mountains on winter weekends so the children could snowboard. They brushed their teeth in resort bathrooms. By the time he was 7, Mr. White was sponsored by Burton. He was already winning small contests. For years he was the youngest rider on the snowboard circuit, and according to another of Mr. White’s stock stories, his competitors invited him to play the drinking game quarters with milk instead of beer. But the good vibes ended early. When Mr. White was 15, he flew to Sapporo for the Toyota Big Air contest. Some of the other riders gathered before the event to discuss dividing the purse — including the winner’s $50,000 and a Japanese car — regardless of how they placed. Mr. White refused to go along and won. The promoters gave him an extra $15,000 cash instead of the car. Mr. White kept the $65,000 for himself. Nobody disputes that Mr. White has an unrivaled gift. Tony Hawk, the 45year-old skateboarder and the shining example of how to mature in the extreme-sports world, noticed Mr. White’s talent early and started mentoring him when he was just a scraggly carrottopped kid skateboarding at the Encinitas YMCA. But he also grasped Mr. White’s problem. ‘‘He wasn’t completely living in the skateboard world, but he was really good at it,’’ Mr. Hawk said. ‘‘And he rubbed people the wrong way.’’ Mr. White didn’t make the simple social gestures that signal respect. ‘‘He would learn these tricks — he didn’t know their names, but he could do them better than anyone.’’ For a while the board-sports community accepted Mr. White anyway, because he was so young and so good and he made goofy videos just like everybody else. That ceased in 2004, the year Mr. White turned 18. By that point, says Dave Finger, who oversaw digital media for the X Games for several years and watched Mr. White grow up, ‘‘White wasn’t just Future Boy — he was Right Now Boy.’’ Many riders resented Mr. White for snubbing them, not even pretending they were all friends, an attitude that is central to snowboarding’s self-concept. ‘‘He didn’t show any of that camaraderie,’’ Mr. Finger says. ‘‘He’d just show up and then win and then leave.’’ But within a few years, the nonsnowboarding world fell in love with Mr. White. At the 2006 Olympics in Turin, his energy was infectious. Wearing a white moon suit and an American flag bandanna, Mr. White performed dizzying 1080s (then state-of-the-art) and let out a primal scream when he won gold. ‘‘Physically and mentally, he’s one of the most incredible athletes,’’ says Jayson Hale, a snowboarder who was on the 2006 Olympic team. ‘‘But the truth is he has few friends on the snow. He’s able to put that aside. He has the gnarliest black cloud I’ve seen at the top of the half-pipe of all these dudes who hate him and who are talking behind his back. Yet he still comes out first.’’ BUILDING A BUSINESS EMPIRE In 2011, Mr. White consolidated all his business dealings under the umbrella of ‘‘He wasn’t completely living in the skateboard world, but he was really good at it. And he rubbed people the wrong way.’’ Shaun White Enterprises. Last year he hired Keith Yokomoto, an entertainment deal maker who built ARTISTdirect with the music impresarios Rick Rubin and Marc Geiger, to be his chief operating officer. This was a significant change from 2010, when Mr. White’s mother still managed his business. Mr. White is away from his office in Culver City, Calif., most of the time, so when he was there one day in late August, his staff wanted feedback on a half-dozen projects, including the prototype of a new pro skateboard deck for Shaun White Supply Company, Mr. White’s skateboard line; a mock-up of the next season’s jacket for Burton’s White Collection; and proofs of photographs of Mr. White on a recent visit to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, one of his primary charities. Before leaving for physical therapy to treat a sprained ankle, Mr. White met with some representatives from Air & Style, a European extreme-sports franchise similar to the X Games, which he was interested in acquiring. In his teens Mr. White competed in and won Air & Style events. Then for a few years, he co-hosted an Air & Style show in Beijing with Oakley. Mr. White liked the idea of making another shift from athlete to host and now to owner. ‘‘It’s a long-term play,’’ he told me. ‘‘I have more money now, so I can have fuller relationships, not just that sponsor setup where you’re like, ‘How many stickers do I need to slap on my board?’’’ Back at Northstar, the day after the lunch of hamburgers and hot dogs, the mountain felt quiet. Mr. White’s entourage had shrunk from 30 people to 19. After a few hours practicing slopestyle, Mr. White decided it was time to move to the half-pipe, his home turf. A Brazilian television crew followed and spent 10 minutes walking up and down one side of the pipe, trying to find the best location to set up a shot. Mr. White stood at the half-pipe’s mouth, already buckled into his board. ‘‘If you put the camera right there, I can drop in right before you,’’ he said, pointing to the spot where he intended to fly off the lip. But the Brazilian crew kept fumbling, unable to settle on an angle, and Mr. White’s patience grew short. He pivoted and dropped into the chute, riding up and out the left side of the pipe and performing a cab double cork 1080 (two flips and three spins, launching backside and landing frontside) and then riding up the same side for a double McTwist 1260 (described by one journalist as ‘‘unfathomable’’ and ‘‘incomprehensible’’). Five minutes later Mr. White stepped off the snowmobile and once more looked down the pipe at the struggling Brazilians. He motioned for a second time for the cameraman to scoot downhill a yard or two. ‘‘It’s hard when they haven’t shot on snow before,’’ Mr. White said, trying to keep his cool. ‘‘I set up, and he’s like, ‘Whoops, there he goes.’’’ Again Mr. White rode, soaring. The third time he arrived at the top of the pipe, he was tense and exasperated. Even while flipping and spinning in midair, he could tell that the Brazilians didn’t get a great picture. ‘‘I’m in the air for you, buddy,’’ Mr. White muttered. But thanks to the film that Mr. White was producing about himself, a cameraman heard Mr. White’s aggravation through the feed from his lavalier mike. ‘‘We can give them footage,’’ the cameraman called from down the slope. ‘‘We have great stuff.’’ This seemed to be all Mr. White needed to remember to be a nice guy. His job now was to please his visitors and put on a good show. He pulled down his helmet, locked his boots to his board and dropped into the pipe. Making the iPhone more affordable in India, without lowering the price PHONES, FROM PAGE 1 of soda for 16 cents, pizzas for 75 cents and burger meals for $1.40, basic cellphones have dominated the landscape. Smartphone penetration is less than 20 percent of the phone-using public. But a combination of falling prices, fast 3G speeds and a thriving app ecosystem is fueling the adoption at ripping speeds. Last year shipments more than doubled, to 41.4 million, according to IDC, a market research firm. The smartphone market grew 229 percent year-on-year in the third quarter of 2013, and IDC projects shipments will exceed 129 million by 2015. With that kind of energy, this is a market where Apple can no longer afford to be a fringe player, selling to an elite few and losing out to rivals. It is also a market where 80 percent of smartphones sell in the range of $70 to $200, said Mr. Gupta, the Gartner analyst. High prices have kept Apple at the tail of the top 10 brands by sales, way behind No. 1 Samsung, which sells more than three-quarters of its phones for less than $400, and No. 2 Micromax of India, whose most expensive phone is $350. The cheapest iPhone costs about $525 in India. To draw young buyers and increase its volume and market share, Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., offered a number of enticements besides the payment plan. Full front-page newspaper ads and TV commercials in recent months offered bonuses for trading in certain old phones and multiple deals, but with a single carrier so far. Wary of the inevitable branding-versus-pricing dilemma, Apple carefully couched these offers to not look like discounts. ‘‘Apple has shown great agility in their India strategy all through 2013,’’ said Manasi Yadav, a Bangalore-based senior mobile-industry analyst with IDC India. Making the phones cheaper, without appearing to be cheap, is enticing a new category of young, brand-conscious Indians, like Chaithra Nayak, to switch to the more expensive iPhones. Ms. Nayak, 24, who studies in the bustling coastal city of Mangalore, took six months to persuade her parents to get her an iPhone. Her father, a businessman, eventually buckled when she told him she could trade in her old Sony smartphone for a discount of 13,000 rupees, or $210, on the iPhone 5C, which costs 41,900 rupees, or $680. ‘‘When I use my blue-colored iPhone, I draw attention,’’ Ms. Nayak said. Alongside the promotional offers, Apple has widened distribution channels, especially in second-tier Indian cities. Anith Prakash, 26, a sales executive at a premium Apple reseller, iPlanet, in a popular Mysore mall, can vouch for the results. In the city, which neighbors the technology hub of Bangalore, the store jostles with outlets of Puma and Levi’s in the mall. ‘‘A lot of younger, first-time custom- AMIT DAVE/REUTERS A store in Ahmedabad, India. As India’s smartphone market booms, Apple is enticing a new category of young and brand-conscious buyers with trade-in deals and payment plans. ers are attracted to the offers,’’ said Mr. Prakash, who added that the store had had a 40 percent increase in sales in the past few months. ‘‘The trade-in and E.M.I. offers are getting an excellent response,’’ he said. ‘‘Many are combining both; then the price does not pinch very hard.’’ Buyers, long accustomed to paying a phone’s full price, got the first taste of carrier bundling, a sweetener that has been wildly popular in Western markets, when Reliance Communications of Mumbai began the promotion in Mumbai and Delhi. ‘‘It is a zero-bill, peace-ofmind plan that makes every Indian’s affordable iPhone dream come true,’’ the company’s chief executive, Gurdeep Singh, said. Mapping a pricing-versus-branding strategy for India has been tricky for Apple’s executives. (Apple declined to comment for this article.) The initial reaction to the iPhone 5 was tepid. Contrary to the prerelease buzz that some phones would be priced for ‘‘emerging markets,’’ Apple breached yet another Indian smartphone pricing barrier of 70,000 rupees: The top-end iPhone 5S costs 71,000 rupees, or $1,150. Mobile Unlocked’s iPhone 5S price index, which compares affordability of the phone relative to a country’s per capita income, finds that it is least affordable in India. The $759 price of the iPhone 5S is 22 percent of India’s per capita gross domestic product, compared with 1.37 percent of per capita G.D.P. in the United States and 10 percent in China. Not surprisingly, buyers in India were put off. Mr. Prakash, who sold Nokia devices for two years before joining the iPlanet store 18 months ago, said, ‘‘Nokia’s entry-level phones cost 2,000 rupees. For that amount, you can only buy iPhone screen protectors and protective cases in our store.’’ In Mysore, Mr. Sathyendra coveted the iPhone 5S but had to pay more than a month’s earnings even for the cheaper 4S he eventually settled for. But others balk at the high price. Shashidhar Sathyanarayan, a 46-year-old software entrepreneur based in Bangalore, said he was happy with his Samsung smartphone. ‘‘It is criminal to spend 45,000 rupees for a brand name; only those who want to project a ‘happening’ image will pay,’’ he said. Apple’s high-priced phones are no competition for the country’s top brands, Samsung and Micromax. Samsung controls 33 percent of the smartphone market, and Micromax has 17 percent, according to IDC. Both blanket the market each year with several offerings for every price band. ‘‘Micromax is giving India what it wants: more bang for the buck,’’ Rahul Sharma, its co-founder, said in a phone interview. ‘‘Most Indians don’t walk into a store asking for a smartphone; they go, ‘Bhaiyya, isme chat chalega?’’’ (‘‘Brother, will the chat apps work on this phone?’’) The five-year-old Micromax, which is backed by the private-equity firm Sequoia Capital, among others, sold 2.2 million smartphones in the quarter that ended in September, compared with 300,000 smartphones in the same quarter the previous year. It is set to surpass $1 billion in sales in the financial year that ends in March 2014. Apple’s numbers are ‘‘unimpressive’’ and its phones are overpriced, Mr. Sharma said. What ought to make Apple executives uneasy is that competition is building in the premium segment. Even Micromax, known primarily for its low-priced phones, is looking to invade iPhone’s territory. ‘‘We are going up notch by notch,’’ Mr. Sharma said. ‘‘We are changing the tonality and cool factor of the brand.’’
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