3 ms·

so? China alone is a bigger market for smartphones, than EU + US together.

• adventured 7y ago
  The US is by far the most lucrative smartphone market. It's not even close. Most of the smartphone buyers in China are purchasing phones that the manufacturer makes effectively zero net profit on. When it comes to phones, Apple earns more in profit than every other competitor globally combined. Apple gets half its enormous profit just from the US market. Apple can afford to lose the entire Chinese market thanks to that fact (then they'd only generate a mere $45b in profit and would still be the world's most profitable company). For another example, while Google is printing massive profit via mobile search thanks to its Android position in the US and Europe, Baidu is losing money in China and has never been able to expand globally (and never will, they're largely hostage to the Chinese market). If you're Apple or Google and you can only choose one market to participate in, you choose the US. It's where all the margin is, because US consumers provide the largest-wealthiest market by far. Samsung also still actually sells phones in the US, whereas their market share has been entirely wiped out in China due to nationalism and poor Chinese consumers being unable to afford most of Samsung's phones.