Apple is offering rare discounts of up to 500 yuan ($68.50) on its latest iPhone models in China as the U.S. tech giant moves to defend its market share against rising competition from domestic rivals like Huawei.
TakeAway Points:
- Apple is attempting to protect its market share in China from growing competition from domestic rivals like Huawei by giving exclusive discounts of up to 500 yuan ($68.50) on its newest iPhone models.
- Customers must use designated payment methods, including WeChat Pay or Alipay, to qualify for the discounts.
- Alibaba Cloud, the Chinese e-commerce firm’s cloud computing division, said Tuesday it’s cutting prices on its visual language model Qwen-VL by up to 85%.
Apple provides iPhone discounts as competition heats up
The four-day promotion, running from Jan. 4-7, applies to several iPhone models when purchased using specific payment methods, according to its website.
The flagship iPhone 16 Pro with a starting price of 7,999 yuan and the iPhone 16 Pro Max with a starting price of 9,999 yuan will see the highest discount of 500 yuan. The iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus will receive a 400 yuan reduction.
The discounts come as consumers remain cautious with spending amid China’s slowing economy and deflationary pressures, with the country’s consumer inflation hitting a five-month low in November.
Apple is grappling with declining market share in China, the world’s largest smartphone market, where local manufacturers have intensified competition.
Huawei has emerged as a particularly strong challenger since its return to the premium segment in August 2023 with locally-made chipsets. Huawei had cut the prices of a variety of high-end devices, including mobile phones, by up to 3,000 yuan over the weekend on one of China’s leading e-commerce platforms.
Apple briefly fell out of China’s top five smartphone vendors in the second quarter of 2024 before recovering in the third quarter. The U.S. company’s smartphone sales in China still slipped 0.3% during the third quarter from a year earlier, while Huawei’s sales surged 42%, according to research firm IDC.
The Apple promotion also includes discounts of 200 to 300 yuan on older iPhone models, as well as other categories of products such as MacBook laptops and iPad tablets. Customers must use designated payment methods, including WeChat Pay or Alipay, to qualify for the discounts.
Alibaba slashes prices on large language models by up to 85%
Alibaba is cutting prices on its large language models by up to 85%, the Chinese tech giant announced Tuesday.
The Hangzhou-based e-commerce firm’s cloud computing division, Alibaba Cloud, said in a WeChat post that it’s offering the price cuts on its visual language model, Qwen-VL, which is designed to perceive and understand both texts and images.
Shares of Alibaba didn’t move much on the announcement, closing 0.5% higher on the final trading day of the year in Hong Kong.
Nevertheless, the price cuts demonstrate how the race among China’s technology giants to win more business for their nascent artificial intelligence products is intensifying.
Major Chinese tech firms, including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, Huawei and TikTok parent company Bytedance, have all launched their own large language models over the past 18 months, looking to capitalize on the hype around the technology.
It’s not the first time Alibaba has announced price cuts to incentivize businesses to use its AI products. In February, the company announced price reductions of as much as 55% on a wide range of core cloud products. More recently, in May, the company reduced prices on its Qwen AI model by as much as 97% in a bid to boost demand.
Large language models, or LLMs for short, are AI models that are trained on vast quantities of data to generate humanlike responses to user queries and prompts. They are the bedrock for today’s generative AI systems, like Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI’s popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT.
In Alibaba’s case, the company is focusing its LLM efforts on the enterprise segment rather than launching a consumer AI chatbot like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In May, the company said its Qwen models have been deployed by over 90,000 enterprise users.
