UBS securities analyst Steven Milunovich said in a note to clients sent on Monday, that he expects sales of the Apple iPhone in China this year to be flat compared with last year’s sales. Preventing any type of solid growth for Apple in the country is a longer upgrade cycle, saturation, and plenty of local competition. The peak year for Apple’s iconic smartphone in China came in 2015 when the country made up a quarter of all iPhone shipments. Today, that figure is 19%.
The iPhone started losing momentum in China last year and Milunovich says that Chinese iPhone demand will never return to …
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Chinese authorities have busted a smuggling ring that used drones to whisk $80 million worth of Apple iPhone handsets from Hong Kong to China. It is the first time in the country that drones were discovered to have played a role in a cross-border operation. The drones were used to fly bags, each containing more than ten refurbished iPhone units. Using the cover of darkness, the 26-person ring flew the drones after midnight on “missions” that took only seconds to accomplish. The smugglers were able to fly as many as 15,000 iPhone handsets over the border on a given night. One of the actual drones …
A local law in China is forcing Apple to host Chinese users’ iCloud accounts in a data center inside China starting on February 28th. Besides keeping these accounts domestically in China, Apple will also be storing in the country the cryptographic keys needed to unlock them. Previously, both the accounts and the keys were held in the U.S., which meant that Chinese authorities needing to unlock a Chinese iCloud account had to go through the U.S. legal system.
Securities house Morgan Stanley said today that Apple had a strong showing in China during the fourth calendar quarter of 2017. On a sequential basis, Apple’s handset shipments rose 12% during the final three months of last year, compared to the third quarter results. During the same time period, deliveries of Android phones declined 17% in China. But Morgan Stanley adds that overall iPhone growth in the country is slowing as Android users upgrading to a new phone are choosing models produced domestically from Huawei and Oppo. 
Securities house Morgan Stanley said today that Apple had a strong showing in China during the fourth calendar quarter of 2017. On a sequential basis, Apple’s handset shipments rose 12% during the final three months of last year, compared to the third quarter results. During the same time period, deliveries of Android phones declined 17% in China. But Morgan Stanley adds that overall iPhone growth in the country is slowing as Android users upgrading to a new phone are choosing models produced domestically from Huawei and Oppo. 
Up until now, no Chinese company has manufactured memory chips. This is about to change, according to a report published today by Japan’s Nikkei news agency. A company called Yangtze Memory is scheduled to start producing NAND flash chips sometime this year, and Apple is reportedly in talks with the company to provide the chips for the Apple iPhone. While the chips could be available to Apple as soon as 2019, Yangtze might not be able to produce enough product to satisfy Apple’s needs until 2020.
The Honor LND-AL30 has been discovered after passing through China’s TENNA regulatory agency. Considering that the Honor 5X and 6X led to the release of both the 5C and 6C, this could be the Honor 7C, although that is not official at this point. The Honor 7X launched last December. Unfortunately, TENNA only disseminated photos of the device and did not include any specs. But the images do tell us a lot about this new phone. 
After launching in China back in 2016, Huawei Pay is expanding internationally. Last weekend, Huawei announced a deal with UnionPay that will allow the mobile payment service to be employed outside China. This deal will allow users of Huawei and Honor smartphones to keep UnionPay bank cards in an e-wallet, and then use one to pay for a transaction. Union Pay, which is the largest financial services company in China, joined with Huawei to create Huawei Pay two years ago.