Apple CEO Tim Cook is in Shanghai, China, where a new Apple store is opening Thursday amid slumping iPhone sales in the country during the first six weeks of the year.
Cook posted about his trip to Shanghai on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, where he wrote about the new Apple store, having breakfast with Chinese actor Zheng Kai, and visiting the Apple Nanjing East Road retail store.
The tech giant is opening a store in Shanghai’s Jing’an district with a team of over 150 people, according to a statement.
However, iPhone sales in the country fell 24% year-over-year in the first six weeks of 2024, according to a report by Counterpoint Research. The iPhone’s declining sales were partly to do with “abnormally high” iPhone sales during the same period the previous year driven by production issues in December 2022. The iPhone maker is also dealing with homegrown competition from China’s Huawei, which saw a resurgence in sales after releasing a new series of smartphones.
Apple sales were “getting squeezed in the middle on aggressive pricing from the likes of Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi” — other Chinese smartphone competitors — according to Mengmeng Zhang, a senior analyst at Counterpoint Research. “Although the iPhone 15 is a great device, it has no significant upgrades from the previous version, so consumers feel fine holding on to the older-generation iPhones for now,” Zhang said in a statement.
In October, Cook traveled to Chengdu, China amid a weak start to iPhone 15 sales in the country. Sales for Apple’s latest iPhone were down 4.5% compared with the iPhone 14 during the first 17 days of it being on sale in the country, according to Counterpoint Research. On Friday, Apple agreed to a $490 million settlement over a class-action lawsuit against Cook, claiming he defrauded shareholders by not disclosing that demand for iPhones was falling in China during an investor call in November 2018, Reuters reported.