On Monday, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) opened its 13th store in China in the 24th largest city in the country. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is making sincere efforts of tripling its retail presence in the People’s Republic. Even after all these efforts there is scarcity of iPhone in the region, and this can be considered a good sign for Apple. China is a huge market, and people who can afford buying iPhone, especially the middle class is growing.
Immensely popular in China
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s new device – the iPhone 6 – has been hugely popular across the world, and its late release in China has made it even more popular in the country. Residents of Hong Kong willing to buy the iPhone 6 have to wait for several weeks for getting their hands on the device, according to Forbes.
Growing popularity of the iPhone resulted in an unfair practice of purchasing devices in Hong Kong, and then smuggling them into mainland China by the resellers to avoid paying heavy taxes. To prevent such practices, Apple installed a reservation, where a customer is required to have an Apple ID and a mobile number based in Hong Kong for signing up along with a photo identification. However, the popularity of such bootlegging is very high.
In a recent incident of smuggling, a man was caught trying to cross the border with 94 iPhones strapped to his body. He was trying to enter China on Monday. Every year more than 70 million residents of mainland China visit Hong Kong, and are served by the resellers.
Apple sales grow in India
Apart from China, Apple iPhones are highly popular in India as well. In the last three months of the year i.e. October to December the company sold more than 500,000 iPhones while in the first 9 months it sold only 1 million devices as suggested by the analysis by Apple partners in the region, according to Apple Insider.
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone sales across the world is expected to have crossed the 70 million mark over the holidays, and Indian sales are a very small fraction of those, but the progress made in India is significant in nature. Growing sales in the emerging and the biggest markets for smartphones i.e. India and China certainly do hint that Apple is moving towards record sales.
