China Unicom Passes 300,000 iPhones Sold

Good going. The start wasn't very promising but now it seems sales are indeed picking up. I wonder how are the sales in the App Store there though.

Damn I thought the iphone was a failure in China?

Goona said:

Damn I thought the iphone was a failure in China?

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I'm sure people will come up with some reason to complain about it and/or criticize Apple. The iPhone is a good status symbol, but the launch was marred by the extended period of black and grey market sales of iPhones in China, the WiFi debacle, and the fact that the iPhone itself is a shift in some ways from Chinese mentality towards phones, just as it has been in other markets.

But who knows? 300k is not bad. Maybe it does have a future there.

And to think the Israeli cellular companies committed to sell the same amount of iPhones in 1 year alone.

With 0.5% of the population compared to China!

I'm not sure what to think of this. On one hand, it's a good thing that Apple seems to be making inroads with legit iPhone sales in China. On the other hand, if the crippled iPhone does well there, will that mean that the censorship will continue unabated -- or even provoke a crackdown on the unsanctioned iPhones?

Goona said:

Damn I thought the iphone was a failure in China?

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Now that the non-WiFi phones have cleared out of inventory and all new phones are WiFi enabled, sales should be much stronger.

Embarrassing!

Billions of potential consumers and only 300k sold!

Stella said:

Billions of potential consumers and only 300k sold!

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That's 0.2% of China Unicom 139 million GSM customers, and it's actually pretty normal even if it sold five times that.

The fact is, the iPhone doesn't sell that well outside of a handful of well off and Western friendly countries.

Get past the United States, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Japan, and sales always drop to under 1% of each GSM carrier's customers.

It's an empirical counterpoint to the popular but naive "GSM has a billion customers" myth, which obviously doesn't apply to expensive iPhones with expensive data plans.

It's also why so many analysts predict a Verizon etc iPhone. If North American CDMA customers were to buy iPhones in the same ratio as ATT GSM customers, CDMA models would outsell the top five GSM markets outside of North America, and become one third of world sales.

Cool ! The cat and mouse game of Jailbreaking has found 300,000 new potential players.

iphones4evry1 said:

Now that the non-WiFi phones have cleared out of inventory and all new phones are WiFi enabled, sales should be much stronger.

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i agree with that, but to reach a sales number like that is not an easy job.