“‘We’re very confident about the market position of the iPhone,’ Chang said yesterday in Hong Kong in his first interview with overseas media since becoming head of the company in 2004. Unicom, China’s second-biggest wireless carrier, started an advertising program for the device this week, he said,” Lee and Du report.
“‘In some markets where vendors get their marketing right, the iPhone is already the best-selling smartphone,’ said Aloysius Choong, a Singapore-based analyst at research company IDC. ‘Unicom must lower its prices if it wants to access the mass market for the iPhone,'” Lee and Du report.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Henry A.” for the heads up.]
I would think the Chinese input method on the iPhone would be a major plus.
Apple is never interested in achieving a particular share of the complete market, only of the most profitable segment of that market.
Every feature which contains a variation on the meme “Apple will have to drastically cut prices in order to gain market share” displays the author’s failure to comprehend even the most fundamental nature of the firm.
@Tom
People still dont get it.. they say Apple needs to lower their prices on everything… and yet they dont and their sales continue to grow through the roof and Apple becomes more and more successful year over year.. and still they say they need to lower prices…
If anything Dell and the others should be lowering prices to get people to buy their crap since they are the ones doing bad.
@twilightmoon Turn the Chinese handwriting recognition on in your own iPhone, it’s kind of fun.
For regular Chinese person iPhone can be too expensive, but not for the city people that would find it useful. At the moment without the WiFi it’s too expensive and almost useless phone, everybody at home has a wireless DSL modem, the same with all the busineses.
More whistling in the dark from another carrier with the I-Phone albatross around their neck.
I read the declaration “I-Phone will become China’s best-selling smartphone” to really mean “Holy bejabbers! Competitive carriers will soon have Windows Mobile 7 phones and we’re stuck with these button-challenged pieces of crap!” It will take years for MAC to poorly copy Windows Mobile 7, but it will be too late. Buh-bye I-Phone.
Your potential. Our passion.™
They’ll be alright, I think they all know that selling an iPhone with no wifi is insanity. When they fix that, the Phone’ll do fine.
All hail the truth spoken by the mighty Zune Tang!!
Windows Mobile 7. Vaporware that is based on Windows 7, which really is Windows 6.5 re-labeled for marketing purposes. Now Zune Tang, do you really believe people are going to trust their next-generation smartphone to outdated, unsecured 1990’s-era software with the interface only a programmer could love? The mobile game is over, Zune Tang. Apple won.
I remember a story, a couple of years ago, about a reporter who traveled to China to see the Chinese rip-off of the iPhone.
The story was supposed to show how foreign innovation would never flourish in China, as the China copy factories would simply reverse engineer everything and pump it out super cheap, immediately killing the profits of the original innovator.
In the end, the reporter never saw the fabled iPhene or iFhone, or whatever it would be called.
Was that story just market manipulation, put out to put a chill on investment in Apple?
Or, is blatant copying going to be a problem for Apple in the Asian market?