Foreign phone sales in China plunged late last year, as local competition eats away at Apple’s onetime dominance of the premium phone market.
In November, foreign smartphone makers shipped 3.05 million units in China, a 47% drop from the 5.8 million units sold in November 2023, according to data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), a government-affiliated research firm, released on Friday.
Between January and November, 41.7 million foreign-branded smartphones were shipped in China, down 22%. By comparison, Chinese brands shipped 238 million units over the same period, a 15.2% year-on-year increase.
The CAICT data does not name specific brands. Yet Apple’s iPhones are the most popular foreign smartphones in the Chinese market. The report offers the latest evidence of the challenges that foreign phonemakers, and Apple in particular, face in the world’s largest smartphone market.
Apple has had to deal with a hesitant Chinese consumer who’s pulled back on spending owing to economic headwinds like a prolonged real estate crisis.
The U.S.-based phonemaker has also had to contend with the resurgence of Chinese brands, particularly Huawei, in the premium end of the smartphone market.
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Huawei’s sales have bounced back since August 2023, when it released a premium smartphone with a domestically produced processor. According to IDC data released in October, Huawei is now China’s third-largest smartphone seller by market share, just behind Apple. The Chinese company had 15.3% of the market in the third quarter of 2024, compared with Apple’s 15.6%. (The market share of Huawei and Apple in Q3 2023 was 11.1% and 16.1%, respectively.)
As Apple’s market share declines, once-rare iPhone discounts are getting a little more common. The company is currently running a four-day promotion that offers discounts as high as 500 Chinese yuan ($68.22) on its latest phone models.
Apple CEO Tim Cook also made multiple visits to China last year against a backdrop of declining sales. During these trips, he praised China’s manufacturing capacity and the country’s importance to Apple’s supply chain. He also discussed investments in China in meetings with officials.
Yet Apple’s latest feature—Apple Intelligence, its AI service—is not yet available in mainland China owing to regulatory issues. In December Reuters reported that Apple was in discussions with Tencent and ByteDance to help provide AI services in China.
