New Shanghai Apple Store Will Be Biggest in China

Size over speed appears to be Apple’s new strategy for tackling the China market.

The company is planning to open a new store–its biggest in China–on Shanghai’s famous Nanjing Road, an Apple spokeswoman has confirmed to China Real Time after news of the plan appeared in Thursday’s Beijing Youth Daily.

Aly SongReuters
Customers queue to buy the iPhone 4 at the Shanghai Apple Store September 25, 2010. Apple has announced it will build a new store, it’s largest in China, on Shanghai’s famous Nanjing Road.

The newspaper reports (in Chinese) that Ron Johnson, the company’s senior vice-president of retail, said the company is now looking for bigger spaces to accommodate the crowds that routinely pack its China Apple stores, which are visited by more than 40,000 people per day–four times the average traffic in their American stores.

Joining two stores each in Beijing and Shanghai, the Nanjing Road store will be Apple’s fifth in China, where the company has recently ramped up its retail presence. China is the world’s largest mobile market by number of subscribers and the second largest PC market, with more Internet users than any other nation.

Apple has previously said it plans to open 25 stores in China this year, but Mr. Johnson said the plan to open bigger stores may set this schedule back.

Apple, which had all but neglected the China market for years, has recently stepped up efforts to expand outside the U.S. In its last earnings call, the company’s Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook said revenue from Greater China reached $2.6 billion, four times the company’s China revenue a year earlier. Apple’s CFO, Peter Oppenheimer, said the company’s existing China stores had the highest traffic and the highest revenue on average of any Apple store in the world.

The company’s expanded retail presence and the releases of the iPad and iPhone 4 in China have significantly raised its profile among consumers here, with people waiting for weeks or as long as months to buy the iPhone 4 through official channels (others just buy the devices overseas or from gray market sellers).

Although Apple stores frequently restock iPhone 4s, the devices sell out so quickly that customers typically have to make repeated visits to Apple’s Chinese website in order to reserve one.

– Loretta Chao. Follow her on Twitter @lorettac

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    • Dan, Lol.

      Hope I spelled that right…

    • Apple in China is becoming another Rolex, Mercedes Benz, Louis Vuitton… an ABSOLUTE MUST HAVE! THAT, will lead to huge numbers, and an almost indomitable lead over….over…..what ARE their names? The ‘Me toos?’

    • Anonymous, don’t you mean “you have brought shame on your families”? Oh, sweet irony…

    • Yes, TonyC., “open the bigger, the better…” :-)

    • 開越大越好….

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