Welcome to the 210th edition of Trade War ~
With more from my April trip to China inside!
Apple is losing market share in China as local competitors come out with cutting-edge technology. Billboards across the country feature the most competitive Chinese smartphone makers. And the US tightens chip sales to Huawei.
China launches “cash for clunkers” program to boost flagging sales. “Consumption promotion month” launched in Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei province. And the big question now bedeviling economists: why don’t China’s top leaders take more forceful steps to boost the spending power of the Chinese people?
US tariffs on Chinese EVs set to quadruple. Beijing mulls whether a Biden or Trump win is better for China. And the number of asylum seekers from China soars.
Today‘s economically powerful China isn’t remotely comparable to the Soviet Union of the 1970s and 1980s, making calls for regime change “reckless, dangerous and utterly impractical,” argues Fareed Zakaria.
Apple’s iPhone loses ground to Chinese brands
The Apple iPhone is losing market share in China as local competitors release new smartphones with cutting-edge technology.
Earlier this month Apple announced that its first quarter global sales fell 4.3 percent compared with a year earlier, while sales in “greater China”—Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and mainland China—dropped by 8 percent to $16.4 billion.
Meanwhile, iPhone sales by unit dropped almost 20 percent in the first quarter to third, behind local brands Vivo and Honor, according to Counterpoint Research.
“A fall in Apple’s sales in China—even after a rare discount on iPhones—shows that some consumers there no longer see Apple’s flagship product as the most advanced in technology,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
“The leading Chinese brands including Vivo, Xiaomi, Huawei and Honor have recently introduced smartphones that use AI for purposes such as translating languages and creating and editing images.”
China trip take
On my recent trip to China with stops in Beijing, Tianjin, Xi’an, Shanghai, Changsha, Liuzhou, Nanning, and Guangzhou, billboards featuring Chinese smartphones were ubiquitous, signaling the relentless rise of local brands.
Huawei, to cite one example, saw its unit sales soar 70 percent in the quarter from January through March, according to Counterpoint. And last month the Chinese company introduced its Pura 70 smartphone series ($760 to $1,500) with a powerful China-developed chip, despite U.S. efforts to block the country’s advanced semiconductor-making capabilities.
Here is a billboard in Nanning, Guangxi showing hip youth displaying their Huawei products, while in the background a pink dragon appears draped across the roof of a KFC shop.
And below, another street, another Huawei ad, this one for the Pura 70, also in Nanning, Guangxi.
And here is an ad for Huawei’s nova 12 smartphone in Changsha, Hunan.
US clamps down on chips to Huawei
Meanwhile, Washington has revoked export licenses that allowed Intel and Qualcomm to sell semiconductors for Huawei’s laptops and mobile phones.
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