With no more carriers left to conquer, Apple’s Tim Cook wept

“After years of negotiations, Apple on Friday finally started selling iPhones through China Mobile, the world’s largest wireless carrier,” Patrick Seitz reports for Investor’s Business Daily. “The launch will test the consumer appetite for high-end smartphones in a market that has embraced lower-cost Google Android handsets from Samsung and others.”

“China Mobile was the last major piece to Apple’s iPhone distribution map,” Seitz reports. “One would be forgiven for thinking that Apple CEO Tim Cook wept like Alexander the Great upon realizing he had no more worlds to conquer.”

“China Mobile has 763 million subscribers, with 181 million using its 3G network. Apple’s iPhone will work on China Mobile’s 3G network and its new 4G network,” Seitz reports. “Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brian White estimated that Apple will sell 20 million to 24 million iPhones through China Mobile in 2014. ‘In our view, the opportunity for Apple with China Mobile is significant and the relationship has only just begun, providing investors with a new, long-term growth vector to look forward to in the coming years,’ he said in a research note Friday. ‘Apple has courted China Mobile for years, and we believe this marriage will prove worth the wait.'”

Read more in the full article here.

24 Comments

  1. The headline is wrong: Apple’s iPhones are accessible only to 150 wireless carriers worldwide versus 250 carriers Samsung has. Most of major carriers are covered, but even after China Mobile deal, many major carriers still do not carry iPhone.

  2. Tim Cook wept? Who cares. Apple down $13 and it’s shareholders who need to do the weeping. Instead of getting Nest Labs like Google did and go up $25, Apple made a deal with a carrier whose subscribers can’t afford iPhones and the stock ends up taking. Thanks, Tim. We can always count on you to take Apple down a a bunch of points. Apple is getting uglier by the day.

        1. Friday was the expiration day for longterm options (LEAPS), which could be purchased since September 2011. LEAPS expire only once a year (3rd Saturday of January) and almost always cause higher volatility. The reason is not manipulation, but rather the normal workings of the options markets use of delta hedging. Every year this occurs: every year it is misunderstood.

    1. As long as you’re not trying to sell today, why do you care exactly what the day to day price is? As long as the dividends keep coming, I won’t care too much until I want to sell (long long in the future).

    2. I have thought a lot about this Nest deal, since I was lusting after one for a while. I can’t see where a thermostat fits in with iPads, Macs, television, music, movies, iOS in the Car. I think most people think Nest should have become part of Apple because it was a really cool looking product. But how many people are delighted by the things their thermostat does after the first few days? Whereas an iPad can delight one every day. Unless you think Apple could have developed an SKD for a thermostat and run apps on it.

      1. Nest is a cool device (the thermostat; I don’t know about the smoke detector). I don’t think that it would have been a good fit for Apple, but I do know that the concept of Google having that information about me (when I’m home, when I’m moving around the house, when I’m awake, when I choose to set my thermostat remotely) scares the hell out of me. I’m seriously thinking about getting rid of the Nest, and I really love it (and I think that it’s energy management is saving me money).

    3. Puhleeze. Apple’s leadership has consistently said they don’t play the stock price game. You shouldn’t fret unless you are a day trader. Go to http://www.asymco.com to get Horace Dediu’s calm, patient slicing and dicing of Apple’s financials versus its competitors. I think you will be relieved.
      dd

  3. BS. After subjugating Persia, Alexander was poised to conquer India next, when his army threatened mutiny, and he turned back.

    The correct quote is from Plutarch:

    Alexander cried when he heard Anaxarchus talk about the infinite number of worlds in the universe. One of Alexander’s friends asked him what was the matter, and he replied: “There are so many worlds, and I have not yet conquered even one.”‘

  4. If 1% buy an iPhone, that’s 76 million phones. Will 1% be so hard to find? On the metro in Shanghai, already half the phones you see being used are iPhones WITHOUT China Mobile.

  5. Tim Cook and Apple will see some benefit over the next year — probably 18 million extra iPhones. But this is not about next year … it is about China’s growing middle class. There are 181M who can afford premium smartphones on China Mobile NOW, but in five years? Probably double that. Ten years? Probably double THAT.

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