WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesús.
China: Samsung widens lead over iPhone.
Apple's initial strategy of partnering a single mobile carrier in China may have backfired, where rival Samsung has opened up a huge lead in smartphone market, reports say.
News wire Bloomberg in its report, said that the iPhone had a 7.5 pecent share of China's smartphone sales, while Samsung had more than three times that at 24.3 percent. It noted that this made Apple the fifth largest smartphone seller in the country, while Samsung was number one.
This comes as Apple got a second partner in China last week, China Telecom to sell its mobilephones, in an effort to close the gap. It had previously exclusively sold the handset through China Unicom.
According to news site Business Insider, the largest telco China Mobile is expected to wait until Apple released an LTE version for the country by the end of 2012. It noted that an estimated 15 million "jail-broken" iPhones are already used on China Mobile's network, even without the carrier actually selling the phone.
Bloomberg pointed out that Apple chose not to make a phone with China Mobile because the operator used a unique 3G standard called TD-SCDMA.
