Apple's shipments to China jumped 52% in April

Apple Inc's iPhone rebounded in China last month, with shipments surging 52 percent, helped by a series of discounts offered by retail partners.

According to the latest data released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) on Tuesday (May 28), smartphone shipments in China rose 52 per cent to 3.495 million units in April from 2.301 million a year earlier.

Although the data does not explicitly mention Apple, the company is the dominant foreign handset maker in China's smartphone-dominated market. This also means that the growth in shipments of foreign brands can be attributed to Apple's performance. Apple recorded an increase in shipments in March after two months of declines at the start of the year.

Apple and its Chinese resellers have been cutting prices to promote sales since 2024, and these activities will continue through the promotion season, which includes a shopping festival event on June 18. Sales of Apple's latest generation of phones have fallen by double digits and the company has lost market share to Huawei, a local brand.

Huawei overtook Apple in the first quarter to become the second-largest smartphone vendor in China.

The decline in iPhone sales in China may be coming to an end, according to Bloomberg industry Research analysts, as consumers expressed greater interest in upgrading to a new device in a recent survey.

"The iPhone's shrinking market share in China may soon stabilize, with our latest survey showing Apple regaining its position as the favorite smartphone brand among Chinese consumers after being supplanted by Huawei," Bloomberg analysts Steven Tseng and Sean Chen wrote in a report.

They believe the reversal in user interest may be due to the upmarket trend in China, which requires long waiting times to buy Huawei's high-end models and is exacerbated by consumer fatigue. "More than half of the respondents said they would be willing to spend more than 4,000 yuan (S $744.82) on their next phone, compared to 33 per cent who currently use high-end phones."