China is becoming an increasingly important territory for Apple. In the first quarter of 2012 alone, sales of Apple smartphones in the Chinese market tripled.
Just the other day we wrote about Microsoft’s loud statement, according to which the share of Windows Phone in China is greater than the share of iOS: 7% vs. 6%. As it turned out today, the data shared by Michael van der Bel, Microsoft’s China operations director, is far from the truth.
According to a report by Woori Investment and Securities Co., in January-March 2012, Apple sold 6.2 million devices in China, 4.1 million more than in the fourth quarter of 2011. Thanks to this, the share of iOS smartphones in this market has grown from, attention, 8% to a significant 19%. The catalyst for such an impressive growth, according to Woori Investment analysts, was the launch of iPhone 4S sales, which took place in China only last January.
Thus, we can say that iOS continues to catch up with Android in China, whose share, we recall, in this market is about 70%.
However, the main player in the Android market – the Korean company Samsung – also increased its share of presence in the Chinese smartphone market, selling 9 million devices in the first quarter (2.3 million more than in October-December 2011), occupying 28% of the market.
According to the results of the first quarter of this year, China is the world’s largest smartphone market. The demand for devices in China has increased by 156% to 32 million devices in the last year alone. This is 22% of global shipments.
A small remark: the fact that China has become the largest smartphone market unobtrusively hints at which market mobile application developers should already be targeting, not forgetting, of course, about the American and Japanese.