When it comes to China's tech industry, the bigger truly is better. So when Apple released the larger-screen version of their iPhone 6, the iPhone 6 Plus, earlier this year economists saw a huge spike in sales courtesy of the ever-growing Chinese market. And with booming electronic sales well into the Chinese New Year, as they new Plus-sized iPhones remained at the top of everyone's wish list, people started referring to China as the "golden goose" for Apple, who has made quite a mint on its new and improved product.
"Apple fans in China have been waiting years for bigger-screen iPhones and they are upgrading at a furious rate to the new models" Executive Director at research firm Strategy Analystics, Nail Mawston says.
In fact, in a shocking turn of events Apple reported this week that for the first time ever China dominated its sales for the first quarter of the year, beating the United States in an unprecedented surge courtesy of the iPhone 6 Plus. This year alone Apple reports that they have seen $16.8 billion is sales in China, a whopping 71 percent increase from past years. And if everything continues at a steady rate, analysts from FBR Capital Markets estimate that China could represent near half of Apple's revenue as soon as 2017.
Four years ago Apple lost a huge chunk of the Chinese market when Samsung won over millions with the release of its giant Galaxy Note. Boasting a 125% screen size in comparison to traditional cellphone models, the Galaxy Note brought in a pretty penny for Samsung, but now that Apple has upgraded to a larger screen in its select Plus model, they're starting to win some of their fans back in the Far East.
"Apple really had no choice but to come back with a bigger screen iPhone for the 5-inch category to bring those switchers back" Mawston says. "And that's precisely what they've done."
Why are bigger screens so important for the Chinese market?
While the increase in user-friendly interface may be obvious to the average consumer, the problem with Chinese text may not. Due to the fact that unlike traditional alphabetic languages Chinese is written in a wide variety of characters, the larger screens allow users to more comfortably work around the difficulties of a character-based language. And since cellphones are amongst the only mobile computing devices used in China, the upgrade is even more important to the growing fanbase across the Pacific.
