Apple is expanding their influence in the world with an upcoming growth in the sales of their iPhone. China is the next national target with a new partnership between Apple and China Telecom.
Apple is dominating the minds and calls of many people in the world, using their iPhone since 2007 to create a cult image of mobile smartphones. Now, they are expanding to Asia, China specifically. As one analyst has already quoted; “There is no reason at all Apple can not grow much much bigger.”. The company they plan on going with, China Telecom, is the biggest land line and Wi-Fi broadband seller in the country. It is a similar equivalent of Verizon “Big Red” in the United States but larger. It is the third largest mobile network provider in China. The Chinese government retains majority rule in the company, owning the most shares.
The move by Apple will give the 106 million Chinese subscribers access to an upper level 3G smartphone. The 3G war is intense in Asia just as it is in other parts of the world. The Apple iPhone is a smartphone with a well known profile. European owners of the iPhone are the third largest group of smartphone owners in Western Europe. The iPhone sales in Eastern Europe still need a boost, though. The move into China is a timely one, with Chinese culture enjoying a huge boost in the Western-style “creature comforts”.
Smartphone sales are also rising all over the world at the moment. Nokia was a big contender until they started having problems last year. Samsung and Apple are filling the void that Nokia is creating. Apple is not having problems with their new enemy, android even though android claims to produce 500,000 activations of their mobile operating system daily. The new expansion into China will be icing on the mobile cake for Apple.
Some of the details on the new agreement include the fact that China Telecom is already prepared to have the iPhone on their network. Apple has also expanded their own technology into the CDMA ( Code Division Multiple Access ) format when they started selling the iPhone on Verizon networks. The Guangdong branch of China Telecom has already done a jailbreak of the iPhone and had it working on their network. Jailbreaking is the same as “unlocking” in mobile terms and infers that the person doing the jailbreak is taking over control of the handset.
The China Telecom-Apple partnership is going to start in November, after the agreements are signed. Look for more partnerships to arise with the iPhone on even larger Chinese cell carriers in the near future.
