If it was Apple’s strategy to use the lower cost iPhone 5c to gain more market share it China, it has spectacularly backed fired. According to a new report from Localytics, China has seen the largest sales of iPhone 5s than any other country after 72 hours post launch.
“Perhaps surprising was that of the eight countries where the most iPhone 5s’ or 5c’s were sold, the highest ratio of preference for the 5s wasn’t in the United States or Japan; leading the pack is actually China,” Bernd Leger reports. “One possible explanation is that there was a lot of hoopla around the addition of the gold-colored iPhone 5s as a very attractive addition in particular for Asian markets so this hypothesis may hold true. Keep in mind the gold-colored version is only available on the 5s, not the 5c.”
[pullquote align=”right”]Perhaps surprising was that of the eight countries where the most iPhone 5s’ or 5c’s were sold, the highest ratio of preference for the 5s wasn’t in the United States or Japan; leading the pack is actually China. – Bernd Leger[/pullquote]
This supports Tim Cook’s theory that Apple doesn’t need a cheap iPhone to expand their market share. They are only interested in the market that uses their device.
“I think, fortunately, these markets we’re in—the smartphone market, the tablet market—these are huge markets, and yes, the market might bifurcate,” Tim Cook said in an interview with Business Week. “It has to some degree, as you just pointed out. There’s a segment of the market that really wants a product that does a lot for them. And I want to compete like crazy for those customers and really convince those customers that the iPhone is the best experience for them.”
The report also confirms that there is generally a high ratio of iPhone 5s vs iPhone 5c, with the UK being the only country which didn’t have at least a 3:1 ratio of the 5s vs 5c.
iPhone 5s & 5c Adoption by Country
[spoiler title=”Methodology” open=”yes” style=”simple”]Localytics is the leading analytics and marketing platform for mobile and web apps across more than 1 billion devices, 20,000 apps and 5,000 customers. Localytics processes 50 billion data points monthly. For this study, we examined over 20 million unique iPhones and investigated the breakdowns by country. The timeframe for this study is all active iPhones from when the iPhone 5s and 5c were first released on September 20th, 2013 until Monday September 23rd, 2013.[/spoiler]
