Filed under: Apple Corporate, Retail, Apple Financial, iPhone, App Store
App Store performing well in China despite hindrances
Last August, China Unicom Ltd (CHU) announced a 3-year partnership to officially bring the iPhone to China. As predicted in July, the CHU's iPhone is sold with Wi-Fi disabled, in accordance with the Golden Shield Project. Additionally, 3GS hardware is still unavailable in China.Despite these hindrances, handset and App Store sales have been doing well, AppleInsider reports. It's estimated that $1 million in legitimate app sales have been made this year, with a little over a month-and-a-half left in the quarter.
Black market phones are a huge problem in China, and it's been estimated nearly 2 million are in circulation, most of them jailbroken and running pirated apps. Apple hopes to sell 500,000 iPhones in China by the year's end.
Next year looks brighter: Wi-Fi regulations were relaxed back in May, and CHU hopes to have a Wi-Fi enabled model available soon.
[Via AppleInsider]
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jordan said 1:36PM on 11-18-2009
yippieeeeee
Reply
totoro said 2:14PM on 11-18-2009
Where has Apple said they hope to sell 550K iPhones in China by the end of the year? Link?
Reply
9600baud said 3:00PM on 11-18-2009
"Black market phones are a huge problem in China" - Big problem for who exactly? Certainly not Apple who already sold these phones its not like they're stolen. Not for the carriers for sure, since people have to pay for the phone plans regardless.
The only ones losing is the buyers since they have to pay for the re-seller's markup but that is really their choice so I'm sure THEY dont see it as a problem. Try to stick to the facts TUAW.
Reply
Brendan said 4:21PM on 11-18-2009
The old WiFi restrictions weren't part of the Golden Shield project; they were an attempt to force manufacturers to adopt China's own dead-in-the-water WAPI wireless technology. The restriction was lifted earlier this year, but not soon enough for Apple to start making Unicom-branded handsets with WiFi.
Regarding grey-market phones: these are available for prices comparable to and frequently lower than the official Unicom price; I got mine last year for RMB 4000 or so, and didn't have to sign up for the two-year contract that Unicom pushes. Can't really see how grey-market phones hurt Apple -- they're getting paid either way. And jailbreaking is hardly equivalent to software piracy: most of my iPhone-owning Chinese friends don't use it for anything more than unlocking their phones to run on the carrier of their choice, or -- at most -- installing third-party Chinese input software that replaces Apple's sad, substandard offering.
Reply
rosymarshal said 4:20AM on 11-19-2009
In china Unicorn is selling iphone at a very high
price regarding in America. He is charging 1000$
per iphone. But the sales in iphone is raising day
by day,
Reply