Apple for the day

Brian Chen has an article in The New York Times about Apple and China:

When Apple reported a record-shattering profit of eighteen billion dollars last month, the company said its growth came largely from sales in greater China (photo). This week, some research firms gave a clearer picture of just how big Apple has become in China.
Both Kantar Worldpanel and Canalys, firms that track global smartphone sales, said Apple’s iOS mobile operating system gained market share in China at the expense of Google’s Android.
Chris Jones, an analyst for Canalys, said that, in the fourth quarter of last year, iOS was in twelve percent of the smartphones sold in China, a sharp increase from five percent in the previous quarter. Android was in 86.3 percent of smartphones in the fourth quarter, compared with 93.7 percent in the third quarter, according to Jones.
Canalys estimates that Apple is now the top smartphone vendor in China. But Jones said Canalys would explain how it reached this conclusion only to clients, not with the news media or competitors.
Kantar Worldpanel found slightly different results. It focused its research on so-called urban China, a portion of mainland China where smartphones are more commonplace. Kantar also found that Apple’s iOS gained at the expense of Android. But the firm found that Apple was the number two vendor in the region, with just over twenty-one percent of the market, behind the Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi with almost thirty percent and ahead of Huawei and Samsung, with about twelve percent each.
Whether Apple is number one or number two, its growth in China has been remarkable. In October of 2014, the company was the number six smartphone maker in China, behind Huawei, Lenovo, Samsung, Xiaomi, and Yulong, according to Canalys.
Kantar Worldpanel also noted that about a quarter of the Chinese consumers who bought iPhones in the last three months were buying smartphones for the first time. Carolina Milanesi, a Kantar analyst, said Apple’s introduction of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, which both have larger screens than previous iPhones, clearly drove the growth. “The success that Apple is seeing is certainly coming from the larger screen,” she said. She added that sales there of the larger iPhone 6 Plus surpassed sales of the iPhone 6 in December of 2014.
Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said recently that it was only a matter of time until the majority of the company’s sales would come from China. The company plans to open two dozen retail stores in greater China over the next two years, adding to the fifteen stores it now operates in the area.

Rico says remember when China was a pitifully poor country without enough to eat?