One out of every four smartphones sold in urban China was an iPhone during the three months ending January 2015, according to sales data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. The impressive stats only serve to underline what we’ve been pointing out for upwards of the past year: that China is well on its way to becoming Apple’s biggest market globally.
“Leading into Chinese New Year, Apple iPhone 6 and 6 Plus drove sales to an unprecedented high in urban China with iOS’ share of the smartphone market reaching 25.4 percent – a 4.5 percentage point increase over the same period in 2014”, noted Carolina Milanesi, Kantar’s chief of research.
In the three months ending January, the iPhone 6 was urban China’s best-selling phone with a share of 9.5 percent. According to financial research firm Canalys, the success of Apple’s larger-screened smartphones let it leapfrog Samsung, Huawei, and Xiaomi — despite the fact that the iPhone costs nearly double its next-priciest competitor.
All of this added up to an epic financial quarter for Apple, with the company’s China-based revenue hurtling upwards at a rate of 70 percent year-on-year, bringing Apple’s total revenues from China to a whopping $16 billion.
China is one of Apple’s most crucial markets based on not only the number of people in the country, but the fact that the smartphone war is far from decided there — with saturation level not yet reached as in more established markets. As we’ve highlighted previously, most smartphone users in the country are just in the process of transitioning from feature phones to smartphones, which has intensely heated up competition between giants like Apple and Samsung, and smaller local manufacturers such as Xiaomi and Huawei.
Kantar’s figures suggest that Apple may be winning this race: a theory backed up by other recent pieces of news, such as the fact that Apple recently beat out the likes of Gucci and Chanel to be named China’s favorite luxury brand.
Of course, not all news is quite so good. In what was, depending on who you ask, either an attempt to give Chinese rivals a boost or a response to widespread Western cyber-surveillance, the Chinese government recently elected to drop Apple products from its list of approved state purchases.
The arrival of the iPhone 6 in the country was additionally delayed by regulators, while the Chinese government has forced Apple to allow it to run network safety evaluations on all Apple products before they are allowed to be sold in the country, as well as insisting that Cupertino move iCloud in China over to state-run servers.
On the consumer end, things couldn’t be any hotter though!
Kanter’s other findings about iPhone popularity around the world can be seen below:
Via: TechCrunch
