Apple has just signed an important contract with China Mobile, the main Chinese mobile operator. China Mobile will include two phones, the iPhone 5c and the iPhone 5s in their offer, beginning on january 17th.
China Mobile has 750 millions of customers and this could represent 24 million iphone sold for Apple. This represent several years of negociations and the contract has been officially anounced by Apple last sunday. Tim Cook rejoiced about the contract and its outcome. The details of the agreement have not been revealed but this is certainly an opportunoty for Apple to be included in the largest mobile network worldwide. This is a good timing as well for Apple, the Chinese new year is coming very soon and no doubt this will be a common gift, with the Apple user community very active in China (China represents more than 10% of Apple’s global turnover).
Actually this is not the first agreement for Apple in China, the firm has agreements with China Unicom and China Telecom, two other operators but of lower scale compared with China Mobile.
This is important for China Mobile as well, a company that had delays in his 3G offer and whose network were, so far, not compatible with any model of iphone. This means that it gives the company a much better offer. Early in december, the Chinese government has granted 4G licences to the three operators, giving up restrictions regarding mobile connection speed. No doubt this will develop competition between all the related companies in China and smartphones.
This new 4G network could represent the sale of 450 million new smartphones in China. Now with this agreement, iphone is compatible with the China Mobile network and it should be 100% operational end of december.
You can see more details about the offer on the Apple offical website.
Still competition will be fierce, with the Chinese smartphone offer developing, Huawei, Coolpad and ZTE have great offers as well on the Android operating system. This phones are efficient with the specificity of being much cheaper compared with Apple, a great advantage on this market.
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