Chinese iPhone sales are an important revenue source for Apple – Image Credit: Apple
Apple’s iPhone sales in China have dropped considerably, with shipments of non-Chinese smartphone brands down almost 50% year-on-year in March.
China is an important market for Apple, besides being its largest manufacturing center. However, it seems that Apple’s sales struggle in the country is far from ending, according to recently released shipment figures.
Data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) seen by DigiTimes covers smartphone shipments in March 2025. It revealed that there was an overall year-on-year increase in smartphone shipments of 6.5%.
Broken down, it appears that the benefits of increased shipments are felt by local brands. While shipments reached 22.73 million units in total, 92% of that total was made up of Chinese brands, representing an 18.4% increase.
The remaining 8% or 1.85 million units, are made up of non-Chinese brands, with iPhone making up the vast majority of the total. However, in March 2024, non-Chinese smartphone brand shipments were almost double at 3.84 million units.
On a quarterly basis, total smartphone shipments in China were up 3.3% year-on-year to 69.67 million units. Chinese brands saw a shipment increase of 9%, and non-Chinese brands fell by over 25%.
Continued China troubles
Apple’s financials do rely on Chinese revenue to a point. The Q2 2025 financial results showed that Greater China makes up 16.8% of overall revenue.
While the year-on-year change in revenue from Greater China was relatively flat at -2.3% for the quarter, it’s a market that Apple has had trouble with in recent years. Q2 2025 is the seventh quarter in a row that Apple saw year-on-year revenue shrinkage for Greater China.
The last time Apple saw considerable growth in Greater China revenue was in Q1 2022. That was at the tail end of five quarters of double-digit growth, including one quarter with a YoY increase of 87.5%.
Right now, Apple is having to deal with the fallout of the U.S.-China tariff war, which has seen the administration of President Donald Trump apply extremely high tariffs on Chinese imports to the U.S.
Even with resellers in China offering steep discounts to mitigate falling iPhone 16 sales, it may not be enough to counter political tensions generated by tariffs.
