Apple’s iPhone will soon officially go on sale in China, more than two years after its US debut, but it may not make much of a splash, with smuggled units and similar devices available, analysts say.
China Unicom (中國聯通) late last month announced a multi-year deal to sell the trendy smartphone in the world’s largest mobile market of more than 700 million subscribers, starting in the fourth quarter of this year.
Unicom beat China Mobile (中國移動) to the punch, putting an end to years of on-off negotiations between the US high-tech giant and the world’s biggest cellphone operator, but experts say customer excitement has waned during the stalemate.
“You’re not likely to see any long lines here,” said Zhang Guoren, an editor for CNMO.com (手機中國), a leading Chinese mobile phone review site, referring to iPhone launches in other parts of the world, where users lined up overnight.
“They just took too long,” said Shaun Rein, who is head of the Shanghai-based China Market Research Group. “Every month there was talk about iPhones coming, and people got really excited. Finally it is coming and people don’t seem to care much.”
Part of the problem is that iPhones have been flooding into China since their US launch, even if Apple was not selling them. Beijing-based high-tech consultancy BDA says more than 1.5 million smuggled handsets are in use here.
Several analysts say they expect the iPhone grey market to continue to thrive because Apple and China Unicom will — at least initially — sell a stripped-down version without its Wi-Fi function to meet government demands.
During the Apple-Unicom negotiations, Beijing agreed to allow mobiles with Wi-Fi if they used the homegrown WAPI standard, allowing Motorola to get a jump on Apple with the launch of its touch-screen Motosurf phone, BDA said.
Several mobiles running on Google’s Android and China Mobile’s oPhone operating systems are also soon due to hit the market.
China Unicom, however, insists it can sell 5 million iPhones over the next three years, media reports say. Chairman Chang Xiaobing (常小兵) also says he is optimistic about sales as most of the bootleg iPhones available here are 2G models, not the 3G model his company will offer to tech-savvy customers.
Analysts such as Rein remain sceptical.
“It’s going to be very hard to hit the number China Unicom is estimating,” he said. “I can’t imagine millions who don’t have an iPhone already are going to buy it.”
Unicom, which had 141 million subscribers at the end of July, is betting on the iPhone to draw in high-value customers, promote the launch of its 3G network and improve its reputation for poor service, analysts say.
The iPhone launch may give Unicom’s Hong Kong-listed stocks an initial boost, Australian investment bank Macquarie Group wrote in a note, before adding that the “euphoria will give way to continuing poor results.”
Unlike other iPhone operators, Unicom has said it will share subscriber revenue with Apple and will buy the devices in batches based on demand. It has also said it will subsidize the iPhone’s price based on how much subscribers spend monthly, but has released no further details.
Most Chinese use pre-paid mobile packages, in part because subscription contracts require an employer guarantee or government documents such as a residence permit that can be hard to get in major cities, Rein said.
Many will be watching to see if the iPhone subscription model can work in China, observers said.
BDA analyst Liu Ning suggested it could be one more hurdle for Apple to overcome here.
“That is Apple’s approach to selling the iPhone around the world — Chinese consumers may need to adapt to that,” Liu said.
Intel Corp chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) is expected to meet with Taiwanese suppliers next month in conjunction with the opening of the Computex Taipei trade show, supply chain sources said on Monday. The visit, the first for Tan to Taiwan since assuming his new post last month, would be aimed at enhancing Intel’s ties with suppliers in Taiwan as he attempts to help turn around the struggling US chipmaker, the sources said. Tan is to hold a banquet to celebrate Intel’s 40-year presence in Taiwan before Computex opens on May 20 and invite dozens of Taiwanese suppliers to exchange views
Application-specific integrated circuit designer Faraday Technology Corp (智原) yesterday said that although revenue this quarter would decline 30 percent from last quarter, it retained its full-year forecast of revenue growth of 100 percent. The company attributed the quarterly drop to a slowdown in customers’ production of chips using Faraday’s advanced packaging technology. The company is still confident about its revenue growth this year, given its strong “design-win” — or the projects it won to help customers design their chips, Faraday president Steve Wang (王國雍) told an online earnings conference. “The design-win this year is better than we expected. We believe we will win
Chizuko Kimura has become the first female sushi chef in the world to win a Michelin star, fulfilling a promise she made to her dying husband to continue his legacy. The 54-year-old Japanese chef regained the Michelin star her late husband, Shunei Kimura, won three years ago for their Sushi Shunei restaurant in Paris. For Shunei Kimura, the star was a dream come true. However, the joy was short-lived. He died from cancer just three months later in June 2022. He was 65. The following year, the restaurant in the heart of Montmartre lost its star rating. Chizuko Kimura insisted that the new star is still down
While China’s leaders use their economic and political might to fight US President Donald Trump’s trade war “to the end,” its army of social media soldiers are embarking on a more humorous campaign online. Trump’s tariff blitz has seen Washington and Beijing impose eye-watering duties on imports from the other, fanning a standoff between the economic superpowers that has sparked global recession fears and sent markets into a tailspin. Trump says his policy is a response to years of being “ripped off” by other countries and aims to bring manufacturing to the US, forcing companies to employ US workers. However, China’s online warriors
RSS