Apple courting Chinese developers to strengthen iOS in China

The company increasingly sees China as a major market for growth.

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[Shiimiish]

India, Russia and China don't buy software good luck, if you want to pirate software however.

LIke everyone else, urban Chinese are happy to buy software if it is cheap and convenient.

The iOS App Store is doing well here. Even if you're in the "lower-middle-class" like most urban Chinese (earning US$20-30k per year), you can afford to pay 5 or 6 RMB for an app.

In the countryside (and among migrant workers) it's a different matter, but no company is targeting that demographic.

I'm not sure about what region in China you're talking, but where I live (north east China) 20-30k USD is much more than "lower-middle-class" income. To give you an example a software engineer with University degree and a couple of years experience at my company makes about 16k including bonus before taxes. And this is considered a rather good salary, certainly above "lower-middle-class" and I live in a modern, second tier city and not in a rural area.

Nevertheless I agree that the urban middle-upper class is very fond of Apple products and that there is a huge market to be tapped by Apple. From my personal observation (read: anecdotical) every Chinese that can afford a smartphone will have either an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy; that's about all the smartphones I see around here.

And I was surprised to see that the App-store is very well stocked with native Chinese apps already, with the ratio between paid and free apps more or like the same as I was used from Europe. In general iOS goes very well with Chinese.

 

[Shiimiish]

That is what most qualified workers with a five to ten years of experience make in both cities. A fresh graduate might make US$10-15k, but add in a few years experience, and if you're not earning in excess of RMB100,000, you're doing something wrong. The average entry-level document-shuffler in a provincial department office earns around that, as do most police officers.

Well, from my gut feeling I still would say a >100k RMB (> 16k USD) qualifies for better than lower-middle-class, but this is hardly the point
As I mentioned in another thread today the salaries and wages are growing rapidly at least in the field of industry I'm involved with and sooner than later the 20k - 30k will be the norm and not the exception. Even if we assume only 10% of the Chinese have sufficient disposable income to buy consumer electronics right now, this already makes for more than 100mio potential customers. Apple trying to develop their App-store in China as fast as possible does absolutely make sense for me. Given that Google has problems to gain traction in China, I can certainly see that Apple considers China as one of their future core markets. And as everywhere else people like to have a well developed App store with apps in their native language.

E: clarity