First available in the US, iPhone CDMA is going Chinese.Apple’s non-GSM device is said to be sold by China Telecom, the country’s third largest carrier later this year, according to Reuters.
iPhone CDMA is said to go on sale there later this year, with a possible November date flagged by sources.
China Telecom currently has 105.9 million subscribers – more than US’s chief carrier Verizon, the first to sell the CDMA (code division multiple access) iPhone in February this year.
The move is likely to prove a phenomenal boost to Apple’s iPhone growing user base in China, already suffering elsewhere thanks to the slew of Android’s arriving on the market.
Apple share of the smartphone market has fallen from 30.6 per cent to 18.3 per cent in a year.
The deal would also widen its 3G user base there. “The reason telecom operators are fighting for the iPhone business is because everybody is trying to grab as many 3G users as possible,” analyst Ovum Jane Wang, told Reuters.
“The only way to keep costs down is to build up such a user base.” China’s mobile customer base is highly lucrative one with close to one billion users – 896 million – which is more than the entire population of Europe.
China Unicom, its second largest carrier, began selling Apple’s cult smartphone in 2009 and is the currently other telco to stock the iPhone, to date.
Unlike deals elsewhere, Unicom’s contract with Apple does not include revenue-sharing, meaning it may not be particularly beneficial for the carrier’s bottom line.
And Apple products already have cult status in the country – there was a stampede among consumers in one of it’s principal Beijing stores, all baying for the iPad 2 following its release earlier this year.
The largest mobile carrier China Mobile has yet to do a deal with Apple.
