Apple Inc’s new iPhone 15 is selling far worse in China than its predecessor, separate analyses showed, reflecting stubbornly weak consumption as well as the rise of rivals such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為).
Sales of Apple’s flagship device are down 4.5 percent compared with the iPhone 14 over their first 17 days after release, market tracker Counterpoint Research estimated in previously unreported figures provided to Bloomberg News.
Jefferies analysts led by Edison Lee (李裕生) yesterday said that sales of the iPhone 15 were down by an even sharper double-digit percentage from its predecessor after Huawei outsold Apple overall, powered by the surprising debut of the Mate 60 Pro.
Photo: Reuters
The twin reports mark a potential blow to Apple at a time it is grappling with the weakest smartphone demand in a decade and a backlash from overheating models.
If the initial estimates are accurate, they represent one of the iPhone’s worst debuts in China since about 2018, when local names such as Oppo Mobile Telecommunications Corp (歐珀) and Vivo Communication Technology Co (維沃) began to captivate Asian consumers.
Counterpoint blamed the iPhone’s slump in China mainly on an economy struggling to rebound from its COVID-19 trough.
It added that in the US, the iPhone 15 likely posted a double-digit percentage rise over last year in the first nine days of sales.
However, the iPhone’s debut in China came weeks after the launch of the Mate 60 Pro, celebrated as a triumph over US sanctions because of its advanced made-in-China processor.
It also coincided with a government mandate to expand a ban on iPhone use to government agencies and state companies, underscoring Apple’s growing challenges there.
“The US is hot right now with back-to-back stellar weekends for the new iPhone,” Counterpoint research director Jeff Fieldhack said. “It’s a positive sign from the biggest iPhone market in the world. So definitely takes some of the sting off the China numbers.”
Analysts remain divided about the longer-term effect in China, the world’s largest smartphone arena. Many analysts argue Huawei’s rising prominence could erode Apple’s dominance of the higher end of the market.
Counterpoint said that the Chinese company could sell 5 to 6 million units of the Mate 60 Pro alone this year.
Analysts said that could rise to the double digits next year.
Huawei has now taken the top spot in the market from Apple, Jefferies wrote in a note.
“The trend suggests iPhone would lose to Huawei in 2024,” Lee and colleagues wrote. “We believe weak demand in China would eventually lead to lower-than-expected global shipments of iPhone.”
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
RSS