Apple Eyes China Market with Cheapest Ever iPhone

By Cathy Wu

The iPhone line-up has a new member: the iPhone Special Edition (iPhone SE for short). Apple officially announced the phone in Cupertino on Monday, and China is among the first batch of 12 markets where it will be released on March 31.

The iPhone SE was pitched by Apple as the phone with the most powerful 4-inch display. Basically, it is a diminutive iPhone 6s with similar CPU performance. The biggest selling point — or smallest, depending on how you look at it — that it comes with is its extremely affordable price tag; at USD399, it sells for nearly 40 percent less than the iPhone 6s's USD649 opening price. In China, it costs RMB3288 for a 16G model and RMB4088 for a larger capacity 64G model. The pricing is supposed to give Apple more competitiveness when it takes on cheap homegrown rivals, like Xiaomi and Huawei.

According to Fortune, Apple Vice President of iPhone Product Marketing Greg Joswiak singled out China as a target market at the product launch, saying the iPhone SE could be a good choice for first-time buyers in China. He claimed Chinese buyers tend to start off with smaller 4-inch screen phones, just like the iPhone SE.

However, some experts do not share his bullish view. According to The Paper, Bob O'Donnell, Chief Analyst of TECHnalysis Research, said the lower priced iPhone might appeal to some customers in the emerging market. But he doubted it would be a big hit, because the price was still higher than Android phones (especially compared with some of the dirt-cheap domestic brands in China). Many customers in emerging markets are also already used to large-display phones.

The iPhone SE launch has already caused a wave of reaction online in China, as iPhone launches always do. Some netizens got a bit angry over the lack of creativity of the iPhone SE, dismissing it as unremarkable. Others speculated it would face a similar fate with the iPhone 5C, which many considered a flop.

Online pre-orders for the iPhone SE will begin on March 24.

[Images via Apple.com, Romper]

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