It looks like Apple’s plan to bring the iPhone to China’s 1 billion-strong population is on the ropes. Following previous rumors that China Mobile and Apple had fallen out of negotiations, China Mobile has reportedly called-off negotiations with Apple. China Mobile has been negotiating with Apple to bring the iPhone to Asia for the past few months, and it seems the revenue-sharing model that Apple has been demanding has proved to be more than the Chinese carrier is willing to deal with.
Apple has managed to wrangle an iPhone revenue-sharing agreement from every official iPhone partner worldwide, but China’s largest wireless provider has been playing hard-ball since the beginning. In a market that sees more new wireless subscribers every month than many countries have in their total population, we’d think China Mobile would be more willing to share their revenue with Apple.
Alas, China Mobile has officially broken-off iPhone-related talks with Apple. They gave no reason for getting up from the negotiating-table, but the general feeling is that the iPhone-revenue-sharing model was the deal-breaker.
But, that doesn’t mean China won’t be getting the iPhone. Apple reportedly opened negotiations with China Unicom just in case China Mobile didn’t want to play ball.
[Via: Reuters]