How important the Chinese market is to consumer product sales is being clearly demonstrated by figures for Apple’s iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus, according to news reports coming from Tencent, China’s largest and most used Internet service portal.
According to reports posted on the company’s website, if the Chinese market is entered into the equation, global sales of the phones have not been as good as had been predicted and hoped for by Apple.
The reports say that on the opening weekend of global sales for the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus, 13 million units were sold, exceeding sales of 10 million last year. Yet China was not included in the initial batch when Apple launched the iPhone 6 in 2014, meaning this year’s sales figures are ” bloated” by sales in the world’s largest iPhone market.
China represents a whopping 35% of total iPhone sales.
Tencent’s report say if the sales for the iPhone 6S are separated, China accounted for 4.55 million units, more than half of the 8.45 million global sales – a drop of 15.5 percent compared to the same
markets last year.
The reports claim another reason for the lower sales of the newer generation is that the initial model attracted more buyers with significant new features such as the screen size, while iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus don’t really have the lure of anything remarkably new. They say the technology behind the newer iPhone Force Touch, which are heavily promoted by Apple, has already been implemented in smartphones produced by Chinese phone manufacturers like Huawei.
The other features for the new apple product, which include a new color option of rose-gold, and a 12-megapixel camera, up from the 8 megapixels in earlier models, have not swayed potential buyers.
Tencent says Apple’s lowering of the price of the iPhone 6 after the hyped launch of the iPhone 6S, also impacted sales of the new phone. On the Chinese market the iPhone 6 can be purchased for as low as $504 which is 40 percent lower than the retail price for the iPhone 6S.
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