Apple’s Chinese iPhone Torture
"We will enter Asia with the iPhone in 2008… we will one day enter China, we’re not saying when." Apple COO Time Cook said that back in March of 2008 and it’s a good thing he declined to offer a more specific timeline. Because here we are nearly a year later and Apple (AAPL) still hasn’t managed to ink an iPhone deal with China’s largest mobile carrier, China Mobile. The companies have so far gone through three rounds of negotiations in the last 18 months, each one ending without a deal being reached. Talks have variously collapsed over both Apple’s iPhone revenue sharing plan and its subsidized plan, as well as issues of hardware localization. Now Interfax China claims there’s a new point of contention that’s hamstrung discussions: Apple’s App Store. Seems China Mobile doesn’t much care for the idea of Apple selling applications directly to its customers. Company CEO Wang Jianzhou fears that to do so might undermine its dominance of China’s mobile Internet industry and, perhaps more importantly, muck up China Mobile’s plans for an application store of its own. Said an Interfax China source, "Wang said China Mobile should operate the application store itself in order to maintain its advantage."
:
