Kevin Frayer
Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone shipments in China soared 40% in May amid retail partners cutting prices of the device by offering attractive discounts ahead of the country’s June shopping festival, Bloomberg News reported.
The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology disclosed figures, which showed that smartphone shipments rose more than 13% in the Asian nation, but foreign brands, of which Apple consists the majority, grew almost four times faster, the report added citing the news agency’s calculations of official data.
Foreign smartphones accounted for only over 5 million units of the total.
In April, iPhone shipments in China surged about 52%, after having seen revival in March when it climbed about 12%. The U.S. tech giant’s phones saw a 37% slump in the first two months of 2024.
Apple and Chinese resellers had been slashing prices of the phones since the beginning of the year and running into the June 18 shopping festival.
In a campaign, which was slated to run from May 20 to May 28, Apple was offering discounts of up to 2,300 yuan (about $318) on select iPhone models on its official Tmall site in China. In February, Apple resellers in China were cutting prices of iPhone 15 phones by up to $180, indicating an unusually extended decline in demand.
Apple’s smartphone market share had been facing tough competition from Chinese rivals such as Huawei Technologies.
The Chinese tech giant is nearing in on a billion active consumer devices running on its self-built operating system HarmonyOS, which was developed after U.S. sanctions restricted the company from working with Google, the maker of Android operating system.
Apple slipped to the third spot in China’s smartphone market as Honor and Huawei were tied for the first place in the first quarter of 2024, according to research firm International Data Corporation. Apple’s smartphone shipments in China had tumbled 19% in the first quarter, data from Counterpoint Research showed.
Huawei’s Harmony OS overtook Apple’s iOS in terms of market share in China in the first quarter of 2024 (January-March), as the country’s customers lined up to buy Huawei’s flagship phones, according to Counterpoint Research.
The iPhone maker had lost the top spot to Samsung (OTCPK:SSNLF) in the global smartphone market in the first-quarter of 2024, slipping to second place as it saw double-digit decline amid headwinds in its core markets, according to research firm Canalys.
