At the end of the year and the beginning of the new year, Apple has been making frequent moves in the Chinese market, and its New Year's promotion activities have attracted widespread attention. From January 4th to 7th, Apple's official website in China launched a grand promotion. Users can enjoy a maximum discount of 800 yuan when purchasing designated products with specific payment methods. Each user is limited to purchasing 2 items of each product category, and there is an additional trade-in discount for trading in for a new iPhone. The products covered are rich, including iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods and Apple Pencil.

Details of the Promotion

In this promotion, the price-reduced products are concentrated on the iPhone 14, iPhone 15 and the latest iPhone 16 series. Among them, the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max have a discount of 500 yuan, and the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus have a discount of 400 yuan. After the discount, the starting prices are reduced to 5,599 yuan, 6,599 yuan, 7,499 yuan and 9,499 yuan respectively.

Not only the official website has made efforts, but the online sales channels have also seen a much larger price reduction than offline. Under the official 10-billion-yuan subsidy, the preferential price of the iPhone 16 starts as low as 4,799 yuan, the iPhone Plus starts at 5,749 yuan, the iPhone 16 Pro starts at 7,300 yuan, and the iPhone 16 Pro Max starts at 9,169 yuan. The maximum discount reaches 1,200 yuan. In addition, since 0:00 on January 4th, Apple's official flagship store on Tmall has offered a maximum direct price reduction of 1,000 yuan for the iPhone series. For example, the iPhone 16 starts at 4,999 yuan after the coupons for the New Year's Goods Festival.

It is worth noting that Apple has changed its previous strategy and frequently made exceptions for the iPhone 16 series. As early as October 2024, shortly after the release of the iPhone 16, the online official flagship store launched a price reduction activity. During Double 11, the Apple Store official flagship store offered a discount of 500 yuan for each model of the iPhone 16 series. Combined with the trade-in subsidy of up to 1,100 yuan, the maximum discount can reach 1,600 yuan.
In addition to the iPhone, other products also have different degrees of discounts. In the laptop category, the 15-inch MacBook Air (with M3 chip) can have a discount of 800 yuan. The price reduction range of iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods and Apple Pencil is between 100 yuan and 400 yuan, providing consumers with diversified choices and stimulating the desire to buy in all aspects.

Analysis of Market Pressure

Behind Apple's large-scale promotion is actually the heavy pressure it faces in the Chinese market. The report of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology shows that the shipment volume of overseas brands in China has dropped sharply by 47.4% year-on-year and has been declining for four consecutive months. Data from market research firm Canalys shows that in the global smartphone market in the third quarter of 2024, although Apple reached the highest shipment level in the same period with a market share of 18%, in the Chinese market, its market share was only 15.6%, and the shipment volume decreased by 0.3% year-on-year, and it also declined compared with the same period of the previous year. In the same period, the market shares of domestic manufacturers such as vivo, Huawei and Xiaomi increased year-on-year. Huawei, with a market share of 15.3%, ranked first among domestic mobile phones, increasing by 4.2 percentage points compared with the same period of the previous year.

In the past year, domestic mobile phone brands such as Huawei, Xiaomi, Honor, OnePlus, OPPO and vivo have risen strongly, bringing huge challenges to Apple. The production capacity of Huawei's Mate 60 series has been alleviated, and more products have entered the market, which can directly compete with the iPhone 15. The flagship new models of other manufacturers focus on the price range of 3,999 yuan to 4,500 yuan. With super-equipped chips, memory and other basic performance and excellent imaging capabilities, they attract consumers with high cost-effectiveness.

Compared with the iPhone 15, the sales pressure of the iPhone 14 series and other old models is more severe. Industry analyst Ivan Lam pointed out that in the past, some consumers would choose the previous series of products after the release of new models. However, nowadays, domestic brands offer products with better performance at the same or lower prices, greatly squeezing the living space of old iPhones.

Apple's New Year's promotion is a helpless move to cope with the competition and sales pressure in the Chinese market, and it is also a strategy to change in order to avoid further erosion of market share. In the future, with the further saturation of consumer electronics and the further integration of mobile devices in China, if Apple cannot have new revolutionary products to lead the industry, it will be difficult to continue to gain a foothold in the Chinese market.