“Has Apple become too popular for its own good in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan?” Bob Evans asks for Forbes.
“By any measure, Apple’s retail stores have been phenomenally successful in pumping up the company’s brand, driving revenue, and reinforcing the uniqueness of the Apple experience, and nowhere in the world is that more evident than in the massive Chinese cities of Shanghai and Beijing,” Evans reports. “Out of about 325 stores worldwide, Apple’s largest, highest-traffic, and highest-revenue stores are in China, a runaway market for Apple in which 2011 revenue should soar about 500% to $16 billion.”
“So why has Apple opened only six stores in China this year, when its plans had called for it to roll out a total of 25 by year’s end?” Evans wonders. “Perhaps the reason is simply that Apple realizes that, no matter how aggressively it continues to crank up production of its iPhones and iPads and allocate more of those high-demand products to the Chinese market, it simply can’t keep up with the combined forces of China’s sheer size plus the astonishing appetite it has shown for Apple’s products.”
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