Apple's price cut did not bring about an increase in sales, and the sales of domestic mobile phones continued to grow
Ming-Chi Kuo, a well-known Apple analyst, pointed out that data from the Chinese market during the Spring Festival showed that domestic mobile phones continued to maintain steady growth, while Apple's shipments continued to decline, indicating that Apple's approach of cutting prices before the Spring Festival to meet the peak shopping season of the Spring Festival has not been effective.
Guo pointed out that domestic mobile phones have performed well in the 3,000-4,000 yuan price range, with steady growth in shipments, and the share of domestic mobile phones in China's mobile phone market continues to grow steadily as Chinese consumers' support for domestic mobile phones continues to increase.
The reason why Chinese consumers buy a large number of domestic mobile phones in the range of 3000-4000 yuan is that domestic flagship mobile phones are actually much cheaper than iPhones, in order to seize the market, domestic mobile phones have launched a series of flagship mobile phones in the fourth quarter of 2023, and the ** of these mobile phones has been lowered, no longer emphasizing the impact of the 4000 yuan ** range, ** is generally lower than 4000 yuan.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8G3 processor has improved performance by about 30%, while Apple's A17 processor has only improved performance by 10%, and from A15 processors to A17 processors, Apple's performance has only improved by about 10% with each generation of processors, which has led to Apple's A-series processors significantly weakening their lead over Qualcomm in terms of performance.
Apple's iPhone 15 is still priced at more than 5,000 yuan despite a significant price cut, and the economic advantage of the phone is not high compared to the Snapdragon 8G3 chip, which discourages many iPhone 15 users who initially wanted to buy a domestic phone, which promotes the growth of domestic phone sales.
Although the Spring Festival shopping season is not good for Apple, it is mainly concentrated in the ** range below 4,000 yuan, while in the high-end market, Apple continues to dominate, and many high-end consumers in China continue to buy the iPhone 15 Pro Max in large quantities.
According to the data provided by an e-commerce company, Apple's iPhone 15 Pro Max sales are ranked third, the price of this mobile phone is nearly 10,000 yuan, even after a significant price reduction, ** is still around 9000 yuan, which shows that domestic ultra-high-end consumers are still very favored by iPhone 15 Pro Max.
However, sales in the Chinese mobile phone market are still dominated by sales below 5,000 yuan, and Apple's low-end iPhone 15 sales are weak, which means that Apple's sales in the Chinese market will continue to decline, which will affect Apple's overall sales, and its share of the Chinese market will also continue to decline.
Apple's fourth-quarter 2023 financial report shows that among its many regional markets, only the Chinese market has declined, but the financial report also shows that the decline in revenue in the Chinese market is much smaller than the decline in the iPhone, and the revenue in Greater China only fell by about 2%, and due to the continuous growth of the market outside China, its overall revenue is still growing, representing more than 50% of the global mobile phone market revenue. The revenue share of the global mobile phone market is more than 50%, which highlights its strong position in the high-end market.
From the perspective of market reality, even if Chinese consumers buy high-end domestic mobile phones, they also have the ability to set the ** of high-end domestic mobile phones below 4000 yuan, and when the ** of high-end domestic mobile phones is higher than 4000 yuan, consumers will turn to Apple, which will guide domestic mobile phone brands to set the ** of high-end mobile phones more realistically, I think.