Finally, late last week we learned that Apple will get to officially sell it's "Jesus" phone in the world's largest mobile market - China!
It was a long time coming and rather strange, especially when considering that it is in China were everybody else's iPhone is manufactured, that you couldn't legally or officially buy an iPhone in China itself.
Of course, many are asking, now that the iPhone is about to officially go on sale in the world's most populace country, just how many iPhone's Apple can reasonably expect to sell? That's a good question to ask, as CNNMoney did in a post recently. According to them, several analysts have chimed in on the matter, including the following who have predicted that the iPhone will sell:
- 1 million in fiscal 2010 - UBS analyst Maynard Um
- 2.9 million by end of 2011 - Sanford Bernstein's Toni Sacconaghi
- 4 million in calendar 2010 - Standard & Poor’s Clyde Montevirgen
- 2 million to 5 million - Susquehana Financial's Jeffrey Fidicaro
- 5 million to 7 million in 2010 - Broadpoint AmTech's Brian Marshall
- 14 million in the first year of sales - iPhonAsia's Dan Butterfield
As CNNMoney also said, these guys are really only guessing and time will tell just how close, or just how far off they are in their predictions. Personally, I have never really taken too much stock in analyst's predictions, because, quite frankly, they seem, most of the time, to be completely off the mark anyway.
One of the biggest hurdles that Apple faces in China is the illegal and flourishing Chinese sale of iPhones, and even worse - the sale of fake iPhone's, fakes that have already sold in the multiple millions and at extremely low prices! Some of these clones are almost identical copies of the iPhone itself, leading some to speculate that they may have been created from actual leaked or stolen iPhone schematics!
On the other hand, most of the fake iPhone's are of such pathetic poor quality, and of such abysmally poor reliability, that some now feel that they may have may have given the iPhone a big black eye and such a poor image in the eyes of the Chinese public that its going to be very hard for Apple to convince them otherwise.
So, is this really the case and will these problems really hamper Chinese iPhone sales? Will the iPhone sell well in China, or not, and what kind of numbers can we expect....... 1 million, 5 million, 14 million - 20 million?
Well, to be perfectly honest, I have to admit that I don't know that any more than any of the analysts, and probably a lot less so, so I won't venture to even guess, but as far as my 2 cents worth goes, none-the-less, I'm still predicting that despite the various and unique problems associated with the Chinese market, the iPhone should still do extremely well in the mammoth country.
At least I sure hope so, because the iPhone mammoth's profits have become such a cash-cow for Apple that it has begun to be able to subsidize the price of it's existing products, such as the MacBook Pro's, and, hopefully, soon will be able to do the same for the iMac itself, and who knows, maybe even the MacPro's as well?
So, with that in mind, I really hope that the iPhone succeeds and does extremely well in China, because the more successful the iPhone has over there, the more likely it's success will help to subsidized the Mac's prices over here.
And that would be a good thing, a very good thing indeed.
And that's my 2 cents 4 this Monday, August 31, 2009
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