·
Apple CEO Tim Cook and
China Mobile Chairman Xi Guohua pass out autographed iPhones in Beijing.
HONG KONG (CNNMoney)
China Mobile started selling iPhones on Friday after years of
feverish anticipation and protracted negotiations with Apple.
Apple CEO Tim Cook
marked the occasion with a trip to a China Mobile store in Beijing, where he
and China Mobile Chairman Xi Guohua handed out autographed iPhones to
customers.
Partnering with China Mobile (CHL) gives Apple a
needed boost in China, where it has has been losing the smartphone race to competitors offering cheaper options.
The deal expands Apple's footprint in the world's most populous country,
boosting its potential customer base by 700 million -- more than twice the
population of the U.S.
"China is a very,
very important geography for Apple, not only for its size, but for many other
reasons as well," Cook told reporters Wednesday in Beijing.
Cook was also effusive
in his praise for China Mobile and its chairman.
"We saw a company
in China Mobile that was unlike any other company we had ever dealt with, that
had enormous skill and enormous size and enormous scale and enormous
talent," Cook said, according to a transcript published by the Wall Street Journal.
The two companies said
they have already received more than 1 million pre-orders for the iPhone. On
Apple's China website, a 16 GB iPhone 5s is priced at 5,288 yuan ($874) and a
16 GB iPhone 5c costs 4,488 yuan ($742). The price tag should be lower for
China Mobile subscribers, depending on the subsidies offered by the carrier.
Analysts have
estimated Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) could sell as many as 24 million iPhones this year through
state-owned China Mobile, although others think the number will be closer to 10
million.
Will the iPhone succeed
in China?
Until now, Apple has
only been able to offer the iPhone through China Mobile's smaller
competitors, China Unicom (CHU) and China Telecom (CHA), which have about 425
million subscribers combined.
Having access to
state-owned China Mobile's large subscriber base is expected to be lucrative
for Apple, but the company still has a long way to go in China. The iPhone remains costly
compared to smartphones produced by rival firms like Xiaomi.
That point was
reinforced during a visit to another China Mobile store in Beijing on Friday,
where a woman named Wang, who didn't give her first name, said the phone is too
expensive.
"I haven't
thought about buying an Apple," she said. "There are so many Chinese
brands and I can pick a model based on my income."
Apple also lacks the
app store advantage in China that it has in most other countries, as the
government censors many offerings on Apple's iTunes App Store, and Chinese customers haven't proven willing
to spend money on top-tier apps when they can get free knockoffs.
That has pushed Apple
into fifth place in China with just 6% smartphone market share in China,
falling behind Samsung (SSNLF), Lenovo (LNVGF), Yulong and Huawei,
according to Canalys.
But Cook is perhaps
interested in more than just smartphones.
"Apple and China
Mobile can do a lot more things together," Cook said. "I really see
today as a beginning, not the end. Our work just begins."
--
CNN's Dayu Zhang and David McKenzie contributed reporting. 
0 comments:
Post a Comment