Apple Inc is closing a retail store in China for the first time, signaling a notable retreat in a market where the iPhone maker is striving to revive sales.
The company on Monday said that it would shut its Parkland Mall store in the Zhongshan District of Dalian City on Saturday next week, citing a changing landscape at the shopping complex.
“We’re always focused on providing an exceptional experience for all of our customers both online and at more than 50 Apple Store locations across Greater China,” the Cupertino, California-based company said in a statement. “Given the departure of several retailers at the Parkland Mall, we have made the decision to close our store there.”
Photo: AFP
Apple has about 54 stores in China, Hong Kong and Macau, making up more than 10 percent of its footprint of more than 530 outlets globally. It has two stores in Taiwan, Apple Taipei 101 and Apple Xinyi A13 in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義).
The store that is closing is one of two locations in Dalian City. The other, a store at the Olympia 66 shopping complex, remains open. Employees at the site that is closing would be given opportunities to work elsewhere, the company said.
China is grappling with deflationary pressures as consumption wanes and global tariffs hurt exports, a major engine of the world’s No. 2 economy. Retail sales growth has fallen short of forecasts, and home prices dropped at a faster pace last month.
The company is opening a new store at Uniwalk Qianhai in Shenzhen on Aug. 16. It is also planning additional locations in Beijing and Shanghai over the next year, Bloomberg News has reported. It opened a store in Anhui Province in January.
The company is also expanding soon with new stores in Detroit, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and India. A location in Japan’s Osaka opened on Saturday, and a major new flagship store debuted in Miami, Florida, in January. The company also opened its first store in Malaysia last year.
While Apple is still adding new stores, overall retail expansion has slowed since the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Apple has instead focused on opening up its online retail store in new places, such as India and Saudi Arabia, and updating or moving older physical locations.
In related news, India has overtaken China to become the top source of smartphones sold in the US, after Apple shifted to assemble more of its iPhones in the South Asian country.
In the second quarter, India was the largest manufacturer of smartphones shipped to the US for the first time, accounting for 44 percent of the market, compared with 13 percent in the same period of last year, according to Canalys data.
Vietnam, home to much of Samsung Electronics Co’s production, came in second at 30 percent, up from 24 percent a year earlier, while China fell from having more than 60 percent of all estimated shipments a year ago to just 25 percent, Canalys data showed.
The stark change comes as Apple and its peers have been moving production beyond China and into countries such as India and Vietnam to mitigate risks related to tariffs and geopolitical tensions.
That has drawn the ire of US President Donald Trump, who has been pushing companies to add manufacturing in the US instead. Apple still makes most of its iPhones in China and has no smartphone production in the US — although it has promised to hire more workers at home and pledged to spend US$500 billion domestically over the next four years.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) last week recorded an increase in the number of shareholders to the highest in almost eight months, despite its share price falling 3.38 percent from the previous week, Taiwan Stock Exchange data released on Saturday showed. As of Friday, TSMC had 1.88 million shareholders, the most since the week of April 25 and an increase of 31,870 from the previous week, the data showed. The number of shareholders jumped despite a drop of NT$50 (US$1.59), or 3.38 percent, in TSMC’s share price from a week earlier to NT$1,430, as investors took profits from their earlier gains
In a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, Chinese scientists have built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence (AI), smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance, Reuters has learned. Completed early this year and undergoing testing, the prototype fills nearly an entire factory floor. It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML who reverse-engineered the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, according to two people with knowledge of the project. EUV machines sit at the heart of a technological Cold
CHINA RIVAL: The chips are positioned to compete with Nvidia’s Hopper and Blackwell products and would enable clusters connecting more than 100,000 chips Moore Threads Technology Co (摩爾線程) introduced a new generation of chips aimed at reducing artificial intelligence (AI) developers’ dependence on Nvidia Corp’s hardware, just weeks after pulling off one of the most successful Chinese initial public offerings (IPOs) in years. “These products will significantly enhance world-class computing speed and capabilities that all developers aspire to,” Moore Threads CEO Zhang Jianzhong (張建中), a former Nvidia executive, said on Saturday at a company event in Beijing. “We hope they can meet the needs of more developers in China so that you no longer need to wait for advanced foreign products.” Chinese chipmakers are in
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
RSS