Debasis Mohapatra
Bengaluru, 10 September 2024
China sales is slowly picking up for Apple as the company has witnessed a rebound in the second half of the financial year with record installed base in Greater China. According to the company, the decline in sales during the Q3 ended June was more driven by currency fluctuations.
“We decreased by 6.5% year over year for the whole of Greater China. And if you looked at it on a constant currency basis, we declined by less than 3%. So over 50% of the decline year over year is currency related. That is an improvement from the first half of the fiscal year. And so, we’re happy to see the acceleration. If you look at iPhone, in particular for Greater China, the installed base set a record,” Apple CEO, Tim Cook has said during the Q3 analyst call.
Apple follows October-September financial year cycle & its third quarter ended in June, 2024 for the current financial year cycle.
Notably, China is one of the important markets for the iPhone maker as it draws around 20% of its total revenue from the world’s second largest economy. However, Apple’s market share is slowly declining in China owing to intense competition from local brands like vivo, OPPO, and Huawei.
“We. also in Mainland China set a June quarter record for upgraders and so that’s a very strong signal. And in fact, the survey from Kantar this quarter showed that iPhones were the top three models in urban China,” Cook has said.
“During the quarter (Q3), I should say also that iPad returned to growth in Greater China as it did around the world. And so, we continue to be confident in the long-term opportunity in China. I don’t know how every chapter of the book reads, but we’re very confident in the long term,” Cook has added.
On Monday, Apple has unveiled iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus with A18 Bionic chip globally. Though the design of the new models remains largely unchanged from their predecessors, these new models have several improvements over the previous models, reports said.
Meanwhile, Huawei launched the world’s first trifold phone for $2,800 hours after Apple unveiled the new iPhone 16 series.
Apple is slowly diversifying its customer base across emerging economies where it is witnessing strong interest from buyers in countries like India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and others.
