Although the iPhone has finally broken into China via China Unicom’s 3 year deal with Apple, sales of the iPhone handset wasn’t brilliant on debut, but with hundreds of millions of subscribers across China one would thing Apple is coining it in.
However, according to an article on the WSJ, it’s not necessarily the iPhone hardware that is boosting Apple’s coffers but rather the iPhone App Store being a huge hit with the Chinese. Apparently Chairman of China Unicom, Chang Xiobing is quite satisfied with only selling 5000 iPhone handsets in its first week, while compared with the US that is quite a small quantity.
The thing is apparently iPhone users in China have thus far dragged in some 1 million dollars for Apple from legitimate iPhone applications revenue from the App Store.
There are roughly two million iPhone across China, most not via China Unicom who has forced Apple to disable WiFi on their units to comply with China’s Golden Shield Project, so most of those iPhone will be WiFi enabled via the grey market.
Those unofficial iPhones are driving Chinese users to embrace the iPhone App Store and thus produce considerable revenue for Apple, although China Unicom has said they hope to have a WiFi capable iPhone available by the year’s end.