Apple's iPhone skid in China continues, with another big hit to start 2024
Apple is having a tough quarter in China, with new research claiming that Apple's iPhone sales are down 19.1% year-over-year.
Apple's iPhone 15
All smartphone sales have been in decline in China for some years, but recent reports had said the market was stabilizing. Other reports have said that iPhone sales in the country dropped 56% between January 2024 and February 2024, though this is traditionally when Apple's sales are lowest.
Now new figures from Counterpoint Research have compared like for like quarters, charting Q1 2024 against Q1 2023. Citing Huawei's 69.9% year on year growth as the major factor, Counterpoint says that the iPhone dropped 19.1% over the same period.
Smartphone sales in China (Source: Counterpoint Research)
The company says that Huawei has targeted the same premium market as Apple, but also notes that upgrade demand for the iPhone has been "slightly subdued compared to previous years."
During Apple's earnings call in February 2024, the company reported that sales in China were down 13% year over year. That amounts to $20.82 billion in iPhone sales in China.
Counterpoint does say that it is charting "slow but steady improvement" in iPhone sales "from week to week." It also expects that AI announcements at WWDC could have a marked impact, although presumably not until the launch of the iPhone 16.
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Comments
No matter if the economy is screwed up or not. People are always willing to spend money on cool products.
Having said that, iPhone is not cool anymore.
Also their AI strategy is slow and behind in contrast to others.
iPhone 16 with iOS18 will be very important for Apple in the history to get the curve for the future.
But then you have the phone itself and the buzz around it. Apple plays one card and then sits back for a year and waits to play the next one.
Competitors bring new features to market every few months and the resulting marketing heft does the rest.
Huawei has just released the Pura 70 series which sold out in seconds and will probably stay that way for months. The same thing happened last August with the Mate 60 series and that is the release that supposedly put the skids on Apple in China.
For years now, cameras have been the main marketing focus. Apple has not really been among the top players in those years in terms of camera innovation.
Perhaps we are seeing a shift to AI recently but cameras will still play a major role.
Then there is the hardware ecosystem, for which no one is likely to top Xiaomi or Huawei on home turf. That of course includes cars, where Huawei is putting HarmonyOS on a large variety of models. Xiaomi is following a similar path to Huawei with HyperOS (although it is still based on Android) and also has a car coming to market which is seeing high demand.
The hardware side needs to interoperate and obviously wireless is how that is done. Again, Apple is lagging against things like NearLink and 5G based technologies.
Even at launch the latest iPhones weren't really a compelling proposition as Apple insists on drip feeding features to users and the 'performance' side of things is demonstrably not a major issue when virtually no one has seen their phones lacking in that area for literally years.
It all kind of adds up to a mini perfect storm but in the specific case of China, Apple warned things wouldn't be great at the last earnings call so news like this (if it plays out in the end) aren't really a surprise.