“The next-generation iPhone could well be the first smartphone from the Apple stable to be considered truly global,” Trefis Team reports for Forbes.
“According to Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu, the iPhone 5 will officially debut in October and support China Mobile’s 3G TD-SCDMA network,” Trefis reports. “Unlike the iPhone 4 which came in two variants, one for CDMA and another for GSM, the iPhone 4S was positioned as a global device with a single hardware supporting both technologies. However, the 4S still did not support China Mobile’s proprietary 3G network which made the iPhone inaccessible to a majority of Chinese mobile phone users despite availability on China Unicom and China Telecom.”
Trefis reports, “If the iPhone 5 does come with China Mobile support, which we believe is highly likely given Qualcomm’s recent launch of a multimode chipset that supports TD-SCDMA as well as LTE, it would instantly double Apple’s addressable market in China. China Mobile has over 670 million subscribers, almost two-third the total number of mobile subscribers in China. Despite not being available on China Mobile’s platform, the iPhone has still managed to capture 19% smartphone market share in China as of Q1 2012 – more than double last year’s share… Our current estimates for Apple’s market share do not take into account the availability of the iPhone on China Mobile’s 3G network. However, should it happen, the upside could be huge – an almost 18% upside to our current $700 price estimate.
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]