When Apple reported a record-shattering profit of $18 billion last month, the company said its growth came largely from sales in greater China. This week, some research firms gave a clearer picture of just how big Apple has become in China.
Both Kantar Worldpanel and Canalys, firms that track global smartphone sales, said Apple’s iOS mobile operating system gained market share in China at the expense of Google’s Android.
Chris Jones, an analyst for Canalys, said that in the fourth quarter of last year, iOS was in 12.3 percent of the smartphones sold in China, a sharp increase from 5 percent in the previous quarter. Android was in 86.3 percent of smartphones in the fourth quarter, compared with 93.7 percent in the third quarter, according to Mr. Jones.
Canalys estimates that Apple is now the top smartphone vendor in China. But Mr. Jones said Canalys would explain how it reached this conclusion only to clients, not with the news media or competitors.
Kantar Worldpanel found slightly different results. It focused its research on so-called urban China — a portion of mainland China where smartphones are more commonplace. Kantar also found that Apple’s iOS gained at the expense of Android. But the firm found that Apple was the No. 2 vendor in the region, with about 21.5 percent of the market, behind the Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi (29.2 percent) and ahead of Huawei and Samsung (about 12 percent each).
Whether Apple is No. 1 or No. 2, its growth in China has been remarkable. Just last October, the company was the No. 6 smartphone maker in China, behind Huawei, Lenovo, Samsung, Xiaomi and Yulong, according to Canalys.
Kantar Worldpanel also noted that about a quarter of the Chinese consumers who bought iPhones in the last three months were buying smartphones for the first time.
Carolina Milanesi, a Kantar analyst, said Apple’s introduction of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, which both have larger screens than previous iPhones, clearly drove the growth.
“The success that Apple is seeing is certainly coming from the larger screen,” she said. She added that sales there of the larger iPhone 6 Plus surpassed sales of the iPhone 6 in December.
Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said recently that it was only a matter of time until the majority of the company’s sales would come from China. The company plans to open 25 retail stores in greater China over the next two years, adding to the 15 stores it now operates in the area.