Following a week-long whistle-stop tour in March, Apple CEO Tim Cook paid a low-key visit to mainland China last week. The US technology giant is pursuing expansion initiatives while facing regulatory scrutiny and slow economic growth in one of its strongest markets.
State-run media China Daily reported on Tuesday that Cook expressed his excitement for the work Chinese-based developers had done on apps for the company’s Vision Pro mixed-reality headset while speaking to reporters at an Apple Store in Chengdu, the capital of the southwest Sichuan province.
Apple’s new Vision Pro, which was unveiled in June, is the company’s first significant new product in ten years. It is a “spatial computing” device that transforms how people use their favorite apps, take pictures, watch movies and television, and FaceTime with others.
Unknown is the rest of Cook’s plan for this trip to China, where he usually gets treated like a celebrity. A request for comment from Apple was not answered.
The significance of mainland China as Apple’s production base and key international market is highlighted by Cook’s most recent trip, which has the largest smartphone market and the most internet users worldwide.
Cook visited Chinese Premier Li Qiang, Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao, and other top officials in March while traveling with an international team of C-level businessmen and academics to Beijing for the government-sponsored China Development Forum.
The senior officials told the delegation’s members that despite changes in global situations, China would continue to be open and offer a world-class economic environment.
Cook’s most recent visit to China, however, takes place at a time when Apple’s most recent iPhone is up against fierce competition in the country’s premium smartphone market.
“China’s headline numbers for the [iPhone] 15 series are in the red, and this is a reflection of the broader decline in consumer spending [in the country],” counterpoint Research analyst Mengmeng Zhang said in a market research released on Monday.
Data from Counterpoint shows that compared to the debut of the iPhone 14 last year, sales of the iPhone 15 in China’s first 17 days were down 4.5%. Even yet, the research company attributed this performance to shorter pre-holiday shopping windows as well as supply discrepancies with the iPhone 15 Pro Max.
The new iPhone 15 series also faces competition from a resurgent Huawei Technologies, which recently unveiled its Mate 60 Pro and Mate 60 Pro+ 5G handsets, all of which are powered by a cutting-edge secret technology produced in China and have sparked nationalist fervor among local buyers.
According to Counterpoint associate director Ethan Qi on Tuesday, “China’s premium smartphone market is becoming more crowded, and related to that, there’s been some impact from the Mate 60 series from a marketing perspective.”
“All of these things are working together to take some of the shine away from Apple’s lustre during the first few weeks of iPhone 15 sales,” Qi continued.
Cook apparently attended a Tencent Holdings video game tournament for the game Honour of Kings while he was in Chengdu. The Chinese internet giant’s flagship mobile game, which has been a mainstay on the App Store for years, became the first game ever to average more than 100 million daily active users on any platform in 2020.
Cook’s most recent trip takes place as Apple struggles to comply with the nation’s tough censorship restrictions. In order to comply with Chinese regulations, which demand that apps undergo government clearance before being made available on the company’s Chinese App Store, Apple has had to toughen its app developer policies.
That decision was made after internet censor the Cyberspace Administration of China published a list of the nation’s legitimately registered “app distribution platforms” under regulations introduced last year, with Apple conspicuously absent. The move is anticipated to significantly reduce the number of apps on Apple’s domestic iOS platform.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, Apple has been meeting with officials to express worries about the regulations, but it seems that those attempts were unsuccessful.
With rising geopolitical tensions with the United States, sources told The Washington Post in September that some Chinese government employees had been advised to stop using Apple’s iPhones at work due to national security dangers.
The worldwide smartphone market experienced its worst third-quarter sales in a decade, down 8% year over year, according to a separate report released on Tuesday by Counterpoint.
