Apple Gobbles Up Lion’s Share in Chinese Smartphone Market; In Talks with Alibaba to Launch Apple Pay in China

Apple has overtaken China’s Xiaomi to become the largest vendor of smartphones in the Chinese market. Apple had a 14.7% of market share in the first quarter of 2015, whereas Xiaomi had 13.7% share followed by state-owned Huawei, Samsung and Lenovo, as per a latest report.

The company is in talks with Chinese banks and Alibaba to launch its mobile payment system Apple Pay in China, as Chief Executive Tim Cook told the official Xinhua news agency in an interview.

Apple Pay was launched in September 2014 in US. The service allows consumers using Apple devices to to buy goods by holding the device up to payment readers installed by store merchants.

“We very much want to get Apple Pay in China. I’m very bullish on Apple Pay in China,” Tim Cook said to Xinhua during his visit to the country. Further talking about his future plans he said his firm expects aims to add stores to China, where it aims to have 40 by next year from 22 currently. Cook’s visit to China was mainly to focus on Apple Pay’s entry in China as well as environmental initiatives to protect forests.

October 2014 Jack Ma said that Alibaba was open to working with Apple on Apple Pay. Presently, Alibaba’s affiliate Alipay is China’s largest payment service, as reported by ET.

In order to further show its interest in the Chinese market, Apple’s environmental initiatives include a multi-year project with the World Wildlife Fund to increase responsibly managed forests across China.

Additionally, Tim Cook had joined China’s Twitter-like Weibo on 4th May 2015. He attracted more than 2 lakh followers within the first two hours he joined Weibo.

“Hello China! Happy to be back in Beijing, announcing innovative new environmental programs,” Cook posted on his account. His first post was immediately commented on over 30,000 times and forwarded more than 20,000 times.

Cook’s move to open an account on Weibo came after Apple released its latest batch of quarterly earnings last week, which showed the company sold more iPhones in China than in the US. Clearly enough, Apple is establishing its dominance in the land where a number of new smartphone companies have emerged in the last one decade, and with Apple Pay in the picture, it wants to do more than just sell phones.