Word: marketing
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...should hardly be a surprise that the iPhone is coming to China. Apple Inc.'s iconic mobile device is manufactured here, and an estimated 2 million have already been sold on the gray market on the mainland. But a deal announced on Aug. 28 by China Unicom, the country's second largest mobile service provider, will make the phone available to hundreds of millions of mainland consumers, opening a huge new market to Apple. China now has nearly 700 million mobile phones in use, almost as many as the next two largest mobile-phone nations - India and the U.S. - combined...
...definitely in the minority. Discounting the stock market's fall, Goldman Sachs has just boosted its growth forecast for China to 9.4% this year from 8.3% previously, and to 11.9% in 2010, from 10.9%. Bank of America Merrill Lynch is sticking to its forecast of 8.7% growth...
...course, it will be a long time before the iPhone is commonplace in China. The typical phone here is a $100 Nokia. China Unicom hasn't named its price for the iPhone 3G and 3GS models that it plans to bring to the market this fall, but with a gray-market 3G iPhone now going for about $575 in China, the device will be far beyond the means of the average Chinese phone buyer. (See TIME's top iPhone applications...
...mainland, it could occupy as much as 5% to 6% of Apple's global sales, says Zhang Jun, a Beijing-based analyst with the research firm Wedge MKI. Zhang believes that in the near future, China could make up as much as 10% of the world's iPhone market, which has reached 26 million units in the past two years. "It will add a lot of sales," he says...
...Still, some analysts question whether China Unicom will have the marketing and customer-service skills to drive iPhone sales. The company has 140 million wireless customers, compared with market leader China Mobile's nearly 500 million. While the iPhone comes with a marketing halo that few Chinese companies can match, it will be up to Unicom to harness that. "Unicom has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity," says Clark. "But this might be the time they transcend that." The agreement with China Unicom is not exclusive and offers no revenue-sharing for Apple, meaning the U.S. computer maker...