Reuters: Technology News: New iPhone, 4G technology may mean Apple, China Mobile tie-up closer

Reuters: Technology News Reuters.com is your source for breaking news, business, financial and investing news, including personal finance and stocks. Reuters is the leading global provider of news, financial information and technology solutions to the world's media, financial institutions, businesses and individuals. // via fulltextrssfeed.com

New iPhone, 4G technology may mean Apple, China Mobile tie-up closer Aug 14th 2013, 21:00 An iPhone 5 is pictured on display at an Apple Store in Pasadena, California July 22, 2013. Credit: Reuters/Mario Anzuoni By Lee Chyen Yee SINGAPORE | Wed Aug 14, 2013 5:00pm EDT SINGAPORE (Reuters) - The stars may finally be aligning for a long-awaited deal between Apple Inc and China Mobile Ltd, the world's biggest mobile carrier, that could help the iPhone maker claw back lost ground in its most important growth market. Apple is expected to unveil its redesigned iPhone next month and may also release a cheaper, emerging market smartphone. Crucially, it also now has Qualcomm Inc chips that can operate even on China's obscure networks. At the same time, Beijing is expected to grant 4G licenses by the year-end that favor the biggest of its domestic mobile operators. Apple has so far ducked a deal with China Mobile as this would have required a redesign inside the iPhone to work on the operator's inferior TD-SCDMA 3G technology. For its part, China Mobile has been reluctant to commit to the huge cost of marketing and subsidizing sales of the expensive iPhone. By offering a mid-market Apple smartphone, China Mobile, which has 740 million users, could draw in more sophisticated, data-crunching subscribers to grow net profit that last year was only 15 percent higher than in 2008, when Apple opened its first store in China. While the 4G licenses are expected to be based on TD-LTE technology, rather than the more widely-used FDD-LTE, the new Qualcomm chips can handle both systems, saving Apple from a major re-design just for the Chinese market, albeit the world's largest. "The circumstances and the issues that were a hindrance in the past seem to be getting resolved. So I think there's a higher probability that potentially there's something in the works," said Anand Ramachandran, a telecoms analyst at Barclays in Singapore. Apple CEO Tim Cook met China Mobile Chairman Xi Guohua in Beijing last month, his second China visit this year, prompting speculation that a deal could be edging closer. Apple and China's carriers do not comment on the commercial details of their contracts and talks. FALLING APPLE Apple may be keener now to partner with China Mobile as its sales in Greater China, its second biggest market, slumped 43 percent in April-June from the previous quarter, under pressure from mid-tier domestic suppliers such as Lenovo Group Ltd, ZTE Corp, Huawei Technologies and Xiaomi Technology. The California-based firm's China smartphone market share has almost halved since last year to below 5 percent, according to industry researcher Canalys - well behind market leader Samsung Electronics. The smaller China Unicom, which signed up with Apple in 2009, has seen annual net profits slide, largely due to the high cost of subsidizing iPhone sales - but more recently its growth has outstripped its rivals as it trims subsidies this year having already established its high-end user base. January-June net profit jumped 55 percent to 5.3 billion yuan ($866 million). Third-ranked China Telecom Corp Ltd entered a deal with Apple last year and, like Unicom, has seen net profit fall in recent quarters due to rising handset subsidies, though it expects profitability to improve in the long term. China Unicom and Telecom do not detail handset subsidies for iPhones. Later on Thursday, China Mobile is expected to say its April-June net profit slipped to 34.1 billion yuan ($5.5 billion), according to a Reuters poll of eight analysts, from 34.4 billion yuan a year ago. "Unicom has the fastest earnings momentum," said Vincent Lam, managing director of VL Asset Management Ltd, who invested in China Unicom, but not China Mobile. "It will depend on how iPhones fare in China from now on. My feeling is the iPhone may be losing popularity to some Android phones, so even if China Mobile gets an Apple deal, we will have to see how positive the impact is." China's smartphone shipments are forecast to increase to more than 460 million by 2017, worth nearly $120 billion, from an expected 330 million, worth $80 billion, this year, according to research firm IDC. "Tim Cook says he expects China to be the largest market for Apple after the U.S., but I don't see how that can happen if you don't have the largest operator as your partner," said Barclays' Ramachandran. China Mobile shares, valued at around $220 billion - half of Apple's market worth - have fallen 7 percent this year, compared with declines of 8 percent at China Telecom and 3 percent at China Unicom. The broader Hang Seng Index is down 0.5 percent. ($1 = 6.1217 Chinese yuan) (Editing by Ian Geoghegan) Link this Share this Digg this Email Reprints

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to this feed at blogtrottr.com. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe from this feed, or manage all your subscriptions