China Sell 100,000 iPhones, But Skeptics Remain

11:51 am, December 10th, 2009, Ed Sutherland

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Perhaps with the jeers from selling just 5,000 iPhones during the first days following its launch still echoing in their ears, China Unicom Thursday announced it has sold over 100,000 of Apple’s iconic handsets since Oct. 30. Despite the seeming uptake in interest, experts remain skeptical.

“iPhone sales have been disappointing,” Samsung Securities analyst Paul Wuh told The Wall Street Journal. Selling just 100,000 iPhones with 144 million subscribers won’t help China Unicom’s bottom line, according to the analyst. China Unicom also faces the prospect of competing with its larger rival China Mobile for Apple’s attentions.

The sales figures are lower than those when the iPhone initially went on sale in the the United States. Apple sold 270,000 iPhones in the first 30 hours when the handset debuted in 2007. However, for China Unicom the latest sales figures come with a silver lining.

While the sales figures are low, the numbers may be deceiving. Although China Unicom counts the official iPhones it sells, many of the 2 million “gray market” iPhones in China are likely also Unicom subscribers, the analyst said. Currently, China Unicom has the only 3G network compatible with the iPhone.

China Unicom has also benefitted from the iPhone “halo,” helping the mobile carrier quickly reach its goal of adding 1 million 3G subscribers each month.

However, road blocks remain for China Unicom iPhone sales. In the face of more inexpensive and more powerful gray market iPhones, Apple and China Unicom offer handsets priced between $730 and $1,020 and without Wi-Fi. Despite the early stumbling blocks, the second-largest mobile carrier expects 10 percent of its 3G subscribers will own an iPhone within three years.

That goal has already been surpassed in South Korea, one of the most cell phone saavy markets in Asia. Nov. 7 KT Corp. said it had sold 60,000 iPhone, or 15 percent of the nation’s 400,000 smartphone owners.

[Via AppleInsider and Wall Street Journal]

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About the author

Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.

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