China’s growing Apple fever

15 years ago

“The signs were everywhere: The steady stream of human traffic from New York’s Chinatown to the Fifth Avenue Apple Store” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune. “The housewives arrested at the Hong Kong crossing with dozens of units strapped under their dresses. The scalper fights that broke out when Apple’s Beijing store briefly lifted its two-iPhones-per-customer limit.”

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P.E.D. reports, “Today, according to Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty, Asia Pacific is the company’s largest earnings driver, representing 39% of the company’s operating income growth last quarter… Huberty estimates that there is a core addressable market of 50 million middle-class Chinese with plenty of disposable income and a “strong interest in smartphones and the Apple brand. This is the market Apple was targeting when it announced that it planned to build 25 Apple Stores in China within the next two years.”