Apple is seemingly driving a (partial) recovery of the struggling Chinese smartphone market

Things were especially bad in China during the typically prosperous final three months of last year, when sales dropped by a painful 15 percent compared to the same period of the previous year.

Somewhat bizarrely, no other manufacturers or brands are mentioned in this preliminary new Counterpoint report, which primarily focuses on the positive evolution of the entire Chinese smartphone market. 

With “social activities” largely back to “normal” in the country after a significant COVID-19 wave in December 2022, sales “quickly increased week over week” to kick off 2023, exceeding 7 million units “before the week the Chinese New Year season started.” 

In four of the five weeks tracked by Counterpoint, shipments surpassed a level “seldom reached in 2022”, yielding a weekly average of 6.7 million units that’s considerably raising the optimism of many industry pundits for the rest of 2023.

This particular market research firm, however, is sticking to a relatively conservative “low single digit” growth forecast for the entire year compared to 2022, which would obviously still be a whole lot better than what happened in the region throughout last year.