“Tim Cook said on Apple’s June quarter conference call that iPhone unit sales in China grew 48% year over year,” Chuck Jones writes for Forbes. “This helped generate 26% revenue growth in China which was made up of $5.9 billion in geographic revenue (up 28% year over year) and an undisclosed amount in retail revenue. This compares to total iPhone unit growth of 13% year over year and revenue growth of 6%.”
“Bloomberg reported that China’s carriers were told to cut spending on subsidies and advertising by a combined 40 billion yuan, or about $6.4 billion, in three years,” Jones writes. “This will be a headwind for Apple and other high-end smartphone vendors such as Samsung to overcome but the growth of 4G cell towers should help mitigate the impact.”
“With 32 million or more 3G and 4G subs being added per quarter even with lower subsidies it doesn’t seem unreasonable that Apple could continue to sell 6 million or more iPhones in China for the next few quarters,” Jones writes. “And with a larger screen iPhone should do even better.”
Read more in the full article here.