Apple has been after the China market for some time, and it’s no wonder. China represents 1.3 billion of potential customers, which would be Apple’s largest market outside the United States. China Mobile is the world’s largest carrier by subscribers, servicing somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 million users. That number is more than twice the population of the United States. It doesn’t take a sales expert to realize that this would be huge for Apple. A Wall Street Journal report, with information provided by anonymous sources, said that China Mobile will start offering iPhones later this month. The announcement of the deal may happen at a China Mobile conference on De. 18th which will be held in the city of Guangzhou.
An article on the CNNMoney web site reports that;
“Apple is No. 1 or No. 2 in almost all other countries where it sells the iPhone, but has lagged its competitors in China. Samsung and Nokia, for example, both typically beat Apple in terms of smartphone sales in China. A host of local brands, including Lenovo, Coolpad, Huawei and ZTE have also topped Apple in recent quarters.”
There may be a few other tip-offs that the deal is already on the board. Apple secured permission from Chinese regulators to run the iPhone on China Mobile’s network earlier this year. The same regulators approved a license to China Mobile to create a fourth-generation wireless network, which uses lightning-fast TD-LTE technology. Currently the carrier’s outdated and unreliable 3G network has been a possible hindrance to its negotiations with Apple. While no official announcement has been issued yet, if Apple and China Mobile have inked this long-anticipated deal, it should make buying an iPhone easier for hundreds of millions of Chinese, which will probably overflow Apple’s Scrooge McDuck swimming pool of cash reserves.
