iPhone discounts led to a 52% rebound in Chinese sales

Falling sales led Apple to offer significant official iPhone discounts in China, and a new report today suggests that this tactic is paying off.

Official government data indicates that Apple successfully turned around its declining sales in the country, with shipments bouncing back with a 52% increase last month …

Apple’s changing iPhone discount policy

In most countries, you won’t find official iPhone discounts on apple.com or in Apple Stores. If Apple wanted to reduce prices, it did so via third-party resellers, quietly offering them discounts which could be passed on to consumers.

In this way, the company was able to protect the perceived value of its products by maintaining the official retail prices, while also discounting as required to drive sales.

Apple used to apply this policy in China too, but that first changed a couple of years ago, when the company offered modest but still official discounts on its own website.

Fast-forward to this year, and we’ve seen a whole succession of iPhone discounts as Apple fights born-again competition from local brand Huawei.

We saw the iPhone discounted in a Lunar New Year promotion in January, more substantially in February, and more dramatically still this month – with this latest round of price cuts being extended into June.

52% rebound in Chinese sales

While it’s too early to see the impact of the latest discounts, the previous phases appear to have paid off. Bloomberg cites official figures from the Chinese government.

Apple’s iPhone staged a rebound in China last month with shipments rising 52% amid a flurry of discounts from retail partners.

The latest figures from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology showed smartphone shipments surging in the country, of which roughly 3.5 million units came from foreign brands, according to a Bloomberg calculation. The iPhone accounts for the vast majority of such devices, and its bounceback comes after it registered growth in March following steep declines in the first two months of the year.

The figures indicate that the year-on-year decline in Chinese iPhone sales was reversed in March, and accelerated in April.