Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro series posted a 12 percent year-over-year sales increase in its first week on sale in China, a strong enough opening to put Apple at the top of the country’s weekly smartphone rankings, according to Counterpoint Research.
The new Pro models went on sale September 18th. In Week 38, covering September 14 – 20, they were available for only the final three days. Even with that short window, Apple took about 33 percent of China’s smartphone sales that week.
The 12 percent gain is measured against the prior Pro generation’s first-week performance. Early upgrade demand and heavy channel support helped. The standard iPhone 18 has not launched yet, which appears to have pushed some buyers toward the Pro lineup instead of waiting. Price increases of more than $200 on many Chinese flagship phones also narrowed the gap with Apple’s top models and made the iPhone Pro series look more price competitive.
The broader Chinese smartphone market is still weak. China’s weekly smartphone sales have fallen at a double-digit year-over-year pace since July, hit by soft demand and higher memory costs. Overall sell-out in Week 38 was still about 17 percent below the same week a year earlier. September’s cluster of new flagships is expected to support a sequential rebound, but the Chinese smartphone market has not returned to last year’s volume.
MacDailyNews Take: Bottom line: Apple’s iPhone Pro sales are up 12 percent year over year – and in a struggling market, no less. 😃
Please help support MacDailyNews — and enjoy subscriber-only articles, comments, chat, and more — by subscribing to our Substack: macdailynews.substack.com. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
Apparently, it pays handsomely to be the brand that every other brand slavishly copies…