Steve Jobs, Apple’s late co-founder, apparently never went to China, at least not on official Apple business. But the new CEO, Tim Cook, just went there and he visited the Apple Store in Joy City, a shopping mall in Xidan, Beijing. Local news posted a photo of Tim taking time to pose with a fan, at the store.
While the real purpose of the visit is a secret, like we’re used to when it comes to Apple, rumors are that Tim Cook whent to China to discuss iPhone 5 with the major mobile carriers there, hopefully this means Apple can finally take their iPhone to China Mobile, the biggest mobile operator in china with more than 600 million subscribers. Actually, despite not even selling the iPhone yet, there are 15 million iPhones on China Mobile’s network already, up from 10 million in October.
But nobody really knows what he was doing in China, besides posing for fan photos. It’s also possible that Tim went there to fix Foxconn strikes before iPhone 5 production, or maybe he went there to negotiate a deal with ProView’s iPad trademark lawsuit?
Either way, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reports that Tim Cook “had a great time”:
Cook, who is on his first trip to China since becoming chief executive of the Cupertino, Calif.-based company, “had great meetings with Chinese officials today. China is very important to us and we look forward to even greater investment and growth here,” said spokeswoman Carolyn Wu. She declined to identify any of the Chinese officials or give further details on the meetings.
Exactly how important is the Chinese market to Apple? Well, currently you can only find iPhone 4S deals in China by going to China Unicom and China Telecom which are the only two carriers offering the iPhone, despite that, Apple is now activating more iPhones in China than in any other market, including United States. So, quite a big market it would seem.
On another note, rumors are that Apple will soon be adding Baidu as a search engine option in iOS. Perhaps to make Google even less part of iOS, or perhaps just because Baidu is a much bigger search engine in China than Google, accounting for around 80% of all Chinese searches.
The Chiese market is huge and they are a fast developing country. There’s no wonder Apple has an interest in covering this market.
Guess your site is back from being detected as Malware by Google 😉
I kind of like have few friends in China and they said that they have more users using the iPhone over the Galaxy S2 over there. China population is high and I think they have a big market there if Tim Cook manage to do something there.
Hi Alan,
Yeah, Google finally cleared it again. Now I updated WordPress to latest version so hopefully whatever injection occurred, cannot happen again.
Seems this is going to be a great change in the apple market. Thanks for sharing the news.
Well, he shoulda taken the time to see in what conditions those poor people work to manufacture that precious device of his.
That is irrelevant. You stated that he had to be there to meet with the cell carriers because only the CEO could do that. First, the statement is wrong – it is quite common in negotiating with the Chinese to have lower level people involved early on. Second, your post suggests that negotiating with the cell phone companies is the only thing he could be there for. There are certainly plenty of other reasons for him to be there that might not even involve the cell carriers.
Maybe there’s another secret project – new product development. After iPhone and iPad, what will they come out next. Maybe iTV. I love Apple products – value for money, and slick in design.
I’m really excited about the new iPhone, I just can’t wait for the next keynote when they will represent it!
Its really exciting about the new Iphone. Waiting for it.
I’m an Apple fan. They make amazing products that are easy to use. I have an iPad, iPhone and a macbook pro. I use them all in my real estate business to make presentations and to find my way from showing to showing. I can’t wait till the next iteration of the iPhone.
I too heard a news regarding iphone5 to be released soon. The market is going to be great for apple 5:)
Its really exciting about the new iPhone 13. Waiting for it.