@ Maria..fakes can't be compared with the originals. I agree with you on that account. But in China...there is a great percentage of people who do not have enough money and resources to go for original Iphones there. Going for non-branded and cheaper smartphones is more plausible choice for common Chinese citizens. We must keep one thing in mind that Chinese are very very adroit at making imitations. They have produced huge clones of Apple iphones. But when we speak of customer's sastisfaction then ...of course there is no comparison.
There are plenty of iPhone look-alikes on the market in China, just as there are here. Plenty of other brands want to get on the bandwagon. You tell them the same way you tell all kinds of fakes:
* They're sold from disreputable shops, street vendors, fly-by-night operations instead of major established stores
* They look shoddy and misspelled
* They're cheap
* They don't work the way an iPhone does -- for example, they're feature phones dressed up to look like iPhones
To get a real iPhone in China, you to go an Apple store, get it from your carrier, order it online -- do the same things you'd do here in the U.S.
Meanwhile, while Android is out-selling the iPhone in China, the iPhone is still doing reasonably well.
For example, while the Android is available at all different price points, the iPhone has just one price -- expensive. Well, two prices, depending on memory -- expensive, and even more expensive.
That means that the iPhone is a status symbol the way it's harder for Android to be. If you have an iPhone, you paid a lot of money for it. If you have an Android, you could have paid a lot or a little. People would have to know the specific make and model to know for sure.
Also, the iPhone is iconic. You put it down, and everyone knows it's an iPhone. You know it's an iPhone. You feel the brand buzz coming off of it. I've had an iPhone for years, and I still feel it. For a lot of people, that's worth something.
Then there's the usability aspects, the ecosystem, etc.. etc..
is it really true that people can tell the fakes from the real ones? and can people even *find* real ones? I had kinda thought that there was a lot of fakes in general in China, but perhaps I'm mistaken?
How's the iPhone doing compared with the Android, and what is it about the iPhone that appeals to the Chinese more?
I haven't seen any data about enterprise adoption in China, however.
The folks I know personally all buy their own phones -- but that's true in the U.S., as well. Well, as far as I know -- I don't normally ask people who bought their phone.
But Maria, why is Apple's stock down? One might think that such a very strong showing of the iPhone 5 in the Chinese Market will instill much needed confidence and boost to Apple NASDAQstock value.
I didn't see your response to my earlier comments which stated among other things that the new Iphone 5 may have been built for the Chinese Market considering its many disticnt features that are popular with Chinese users.
At the enterprise level, do you see many Chinese companies adopting the iPhone 5 for their employees?
What is the ARPU for mobile users in China? Higher ARPU allow mobile carriers to increase subsidies but if the Chinese public isn't ready to increase their monthly payment, companies can't subsidize iPhones (to US prices).
I answered this in another comment, but the first example I can think of -- since I work in the industry -- is that many Chinese versions of international magazines are significantly inferior in quality and standards, which articles that wouldn't pass muster at home.
Maria, how you stated this particular sentence caught my attention:
"Chinese customers don't get an inferior version of the iPhone; they get the same product everyone else gets."
I'm just curious, but have there been instances where a foreign or international firm released an inferior version of their product in China? Somehow this makes it sound like it's not an ordinary thing for China to have products released there that are of the same quality of the products released in the US or Europe or other parts of the world. It just sounds curious.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
