Apple's iPhone 5 may be heading to China within the next couple of months after Apple was able to secure an access license Thursday according to The Wall Street Journal.
China Unicom stated this past September that they would offer the iPhone 5 by the end of the 2012 calendar year and so far the company is still on track to make that goal a reality. The Wall Street Journal claims that Chinese regulators approved of the network access licenses for the iPhone 5 this past week and eventually will be sold through China Unicom and China Telecom.
China Unicom and China Telecom aren't strangers to Apple devices, as they have been selling the iPhone 4S since this past March. Neither company has commented about the iPhone 5 news to the media yet.
"We are continuing to invest in our own retail stores there, we continue to expand distribution in with channel partners as well, and we continue to see it as a extremely exciting market with more and more people wanting Apple product," Apple CEO Tim Cook said recently according to PC Magazine.
Apple is in competition with companies like Samsung which offers the Galaxy S3 currently and the Nokia whiche sells the Lumia 920 for smartphone sales. The average price for an iPhone 5 and a S3 is a around $200, meanwhile the Lumia is $100.
The company has also been in a heated legal battle with Samsung over copyright and patent issues that won't be settled until sometime in 2014. Click here for more about the case.
The iPhone can currently be found in countries all-over the world like Japan, and Hong Kong but the report states that there is usually a big gap in-between release dates in the US and China for many different reasons. For starters, they tend to focus on phones being sold strictly within the country to support Chinese made products. There is usually a lot of testing and licensing agreements that have to be met as well before they can release such a overwhelming device like the iPhone 5 to the public.
Apple is currently focused on China due to the lackluster summer sales results in the country. Numbers went up 45 percent during September and October however thanks to the many different iPad devices available, but sales numbers for the company still aren't where Apple CEO Tim Cook would like it to be.
"That brings us to a full year fiscal year revenue number of $23.8 billion for China which is really phenomenal," Cook said during an Oct. 25 earnings call according to PC Magazine. "When you think about it, that's up over $10 billion year on year, and Greater China now represents about 15 percent of Apple for the fiscal year and so we're extremely happy with how we've done in China."
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