Filed under: Apple Corporate, iPhone
Apple, China Mobile break off talks
Apple and China Mobile have broken off all discussions of a collaboration. As for why, mum is the word.China Mobile spokeswoman Rainie Lei said she is "...unaware of any plans for further talks with Apple," according to Bloomberg. Likewise, Apple declined to comment.
This is a blow for Apple, as China's potential customer base is huge. They've got 362.8 million Blackberry subscribers, which is more than the populations of the U.S., Japan, and the U.K. combined. More than 500 million Chinese use cell phones.
We're guessing that both parties are being a bit stubborn about profits and pricing (Apple stubborn? I can't imagine such a thing). Let's hope they learn to play nicely.
[Via MacDailyNews]
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Thierry Wasserman said 11:07AM on 1-14-2008
Does someone believe this number of 362.8 million? This would mean one in four Chinese sporting a Blackberry?!
Reply
Thierry Wasserman said 11:11AM on 1-14-2008
Looked at the original Bloomberg article. They are just saying that China Mobile has an agreement with RIM and that they have 362.8 million mobile subscribers; not that they have that huge number of people using Blackberrys.
Reply
capuns said 11:40AM on 1-14-2008
The population of the U.K (60), Japan (127) and the U.S (300) is combined 487 millions.
Reply
Charles Powne said 11:22AM on 1-14-2008
"They've got 362.8 million Blackberry subscribers, which is more than the populations of the U.S., Japan, and the U.K. combined. "
er.... not quite. According to wikipedia.
USA 303 million
Japan 128 million
UK 60 million
That's 491 million.
Yours, pedantically.
Charles
Reply
Brian said 11:36AM on 1-14-2008
Yeah, that's China Mobile's total subscriber number for all services ... the total Blackberry installed subscriber base at the end of RIM's Q3 2007 was only 12 million world-wide... (http://www.rim.net/news/press/2007/pr-20_12_2007-01.shtml)
Reply
Andrew said 12:22PM on 1-14-2008
According to this article, there are exactly 0 Blackberry users in China!
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080110.wrrim0110/BNStory/Technology/
Reply
Techslacker said 1:07PM on 1-14-2008
Common sense should throw these statements of users and populations out the door.
Don't you think that Blackberry would be a much greater force in the industry if they seriously had more Blackberry users in China than the total population in even just the US?!?!? We're talking one hell of a marketshare and last I checked Blackberry isn't anywhere near that high.
Someone needs to revisit their stats.
Reply
Magpie said 1:29PM on 1-14-2008
Sounds like a little padding of the numbers. The iPhone is ispiring many people to go web mobile.
Iphone Rules
Reply
Magpie said 1:34PM on 1-14-2008
Messed up my comment. I meant to mention http://cafe-iphone.com for iphone needs.
What will Steve Jobs have to say 1/15 about all this ? Anything probably not
Reply
Jacques Lema said 3:43PM on 1-14-2008
300 millions must indeed be the total number of suscribers not _by_far_ of BlackBerry/RedBerry-clones users.
A couple of years ago I worked on mobile games and had some contacts in China. From what I know the number of java-compatible phones in China wasn't bigger than the one in Switzerland.
It probably changed since then but back then basically there were about 5 millions java phones there in 2004-2005. The rest were the cheapest b/w clones you could find around. The 300+ million people "rich" people in china don't have anywhere near the purchasing power of the average westerner.
China has over a billion inhabitants and is definitely going to be a huge market in the future but as of today it's a rather small market for luxury devices such as the iphone.
Reply
Brendan said 9:03PM on 1-14-2008
Not really surprising: China Mobile has said in the past that it will not, "as a matter of policy," consider any kind of revenue-sharing agreement. Other possible factors: voicemail isn't very widely used here, so Apple's Visual Voicemail feature isn't the draw it would be in the States. Also, Apple has had a history recently (beginning with OS X) of relatively lousy Chinese input support, and despite fairly significant third-party efforts here (both through web-based input methods and hacks like porting the FunInputToy Chinese input method to the iPhone), Apple's shown no sign of caring much about Chinese users.
Reply