Apple iPhone Sales Plunge in China

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 5, 7:45AM EST

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Apple iPhone Sales Plunge in China — © 2023 Getty Images / Getty Images News via Getty Images

China is the largest smartphone market in the world. Approximately 900 million people own them. It is also the battlefield for global sales because of its size and the number of large competitors. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL | AAPL Price Prediction) has done well with iPhone sales in China for years, but its fortunes took a considerable turn for the worse at the start of this year.

CounterPoint, the electronics research firm, reports Apple’s sales dropped 24% in China for the first six weeks of 2024. Sales across the industry in China dropped by 7% over the same period. That data was from the research company’s China Smartphone Weekly Sell-Through Tracker.

There has been concern for some time that each generation of iPhone is too similar to the one before. The iPhone 15 had better camera and processor speeds than the iPhone 14. The question is whether most consumers can tell the modest difference. CounterPoint Senior Analyst Mengmeng Zhang commented on iPhone sales data from China, “Although the iPhone 15 is a great device, it has no significant upgrades from the previous version, so consumers feel fine holding on to the older-generation iPhones for now.” (These are the 25 biggest product flops of the past decade.)

Apple investors should be additionally concerned that some rivals gained sales and market share in China during the period covered by the China Smartphone Weekly Sell-Through Tracker. Huawei, a market leader, posted unit sales that rose 64%. Sales of Honor phones rose 2%.

This news could not be worse for Apple. Its financial results were mediocre in the most recent quarter, particularly in China. Total revenue was up 2% to $119.6 billion. However, China’s revenue fell from $23.9 billion to $20.8 billion.

No wonder Apple’s stock is underperforming the market, and many expect this will continue.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.