It was recently revealed by China Mobile that the company is in ongoing negotiations with Apple to bring the iPhone to its network. According to Reuters, chairman Xi Guohua said that the company is “actively talking to Apple” to shareholders during the company meeting. He added that he couldn’t “give you too many details, but he’d like to repeat that both sides do hope to boost their cooperation.”
For those of you who didn’t already know, China Mobile had 667 million subscribers as of March and is the only carrier in China not selling the Apple handset. Demand for the iPhone on Chan Mobile is expected to be quite high. As of right now, despite the lack of official sales of the device, the company has more than 15 million iPhone users on its network. Rival China Unicom was Apple’s first carrier partner in the country and the second-place operator overall. Although sales got off to a slow start, the company said in March that its partnership with Apple is now producing “better than expected results.” An analyst went as far as predicting that China Unicom could possibly sell 24 million iPhones in 2013.
Even without China Mobile, Apple seems to be gaining ground as iPhone sales are increasing as a whole throughout the greater transition. According to a previous report, China Mobile officials are “aggressively negotiating” with Apple but one of the few things that scares me is the fact that the carrier operating a home-grown 3G wireless network that could require as much as a separate device. Analysts are speculating that Apple could possibly wait until its next-generation iPhone to sign with China Mobile as signing with new carriers tends to happen during event announcements.
Source: Reuters
Reply
