China is too important and Apple knows it

According to The Wall Street Journal, Beijing Regulator Orders Apple to Stop Sales of Two iPhone Models:

Beijing’s intellectual property regulator has ordered Apple to stop sales of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in the city, ruling that the design is too similar to a Chinese phone. The move is another setback for the company in a key overseas market.

Competing in China is difficult. Local businesses are overprotected there, and even Apple has to take a step back if someone there feels its position threatened.

It’s difficult to imagine that Apple has copied the design from one of those local, small makers (and not the other way around), but China is too important right now for them.

China is to Apple what Apple is to many of the countries it makes businesses with: the bigwig.

 

Javier Pastor is a technology journalist that has been writing about tech since 1999. He started writing for PC Actual in Spain, the leading printed magazine in the country, and in 2006 started to write online. First as the Chief Editor for The Inquirer ES, and after that for MuyComputer until 2013. That year he became senior editor at Xataka, the leading tech news website in Spanish with over 5M uniques/month (Aug'15, comScore). Xataka is part of Weblogs SL, a blog network that gets over 40M uniques/month and that has a wide catalog of publications in Spanish. The Unshut is his new venture and allows him to express his opinions and thoughts on everything touched by technology, and follows what he has been doing at Incognitosis, his personal blog, since 2005.