Two Chinese reports claim that the 3G iPhone could be nearing its final negotiations for a launch in China. While Apple has done a tremendous job securing contracts around the world (we have put together a comprehensive map here), the China deal may be its most important.
“Apple is no longer insisting on a revenue-sharing policy,” China Mobile spokeswoman Rainie Lei told Reuters on Friday, “so the biggest hurdle for China Mobile to bring in the iPhone has been cleared.”
“We’ve broken through the biggest obstacle,” Gao Songge, deputy director of China Mobile’s general department, told Agence-France Presse. “And we are negotiating at the working level.”
With more than 380 millions customers, China Mobile is the world’s largest mobile phone carrier. Talks with Apple had reportedly been broken off over Cupertino’s insistence on getting a share of the carrier’s monthly revenue, something China Mobile said it would never agree to.
Seeing as how a major part of Apple’s iPhone revenue comes (and will continue to come) from a share of the carrier’s monthly revenue, China Mobile refusing to play by Apple’s rules shows that Apple is not entirely in control of this situation. We are seeing a new side of Apple, one that is willing to bend and operate under “less-than-optimal” conditions in order to get their hardware and software into people’s hands around the world. (Kinda like our friends over in Redmond)
Although Apple (AAPL) has since dropped that demand in many of the overseas contracts signed this year, most observers assumed that the China deal wouldn’t materialize before 2009.
But Steve Jobs told CNBC in a interview two weeks ago that he expected deals with both China and Russia — the other big hold-out — to come a lot sooner than that.
“We just didn’t have a chance to get close with Russia and China,” Jobs told the network. “And I think you’ll see them happen later this year.” (link)
via Fortune
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