Apple Wants To Establish A Research Center in Beijing

Tim Cook, the CEO of one of the largest multinational corporations, Apple Inc., went to China for the second time in the last twelve months.  He had a full agenda and, among the most important activities he met with the world’s greatest telecommunication company (with 700 million subscribers) which provides both voice and multimedia service in order to discuss the most waited acquisition – the iPhone.

Also, Tim Cook visited the Apple stores already existing in China and attended repetitive meetings with officials from Beijing.

Still, maybe the most important point on Cook’s agenda was announcing to Beijing’s government officials that Apple plans to set a research and development center in Beijing (more to say, in Beijing is the largest Apple Store in Asia – launched at the end of 2012)

This piece of news is poached via MacRumors which published a report from Brightwire – report which was quoting the Chinese web portal Tencent.

Also, sources from the industry state that Apple will set a data center in one of the following places: Zhangjiakou, Hebei Province or Inner Mongolia. This facility will give China’s customers a great experience, as the App Store and iTunes download experience will be, obviously, greater. So, they will be able to take advantage in more applications from the App Store with the same devices.

In September 2012,  9to5Mac stated the information that Apple is intending to build an enormous data center in Hong Kong, China, as the company already had a location near the Shenzen China border for this data center

China’s news portal Sina Technology News had an interview with Cook who stated that China continues to be the most important market for Apple products. He also said that China is a real market which is constantly changing and finds improvements, so it transmits a lot of energy.

Also, Cook refused to talk about the current product roadmap planned for Apple, but he said Apple is trying to find new and better solutions to bring its devices to China faster; the problem now is with the approval process which is very complicated and time-consuming.

Regarding other rumors about Apple’s products, in the last month the manufacturing  of a new and inexpensive iPhone model is said to be developing soon. The device is considered to be a strategic shift for the company, as it is designed especially for the emerging markets and countries such as China, Brazil. All these are the markets where iPhone is considered too expensive versus the Android devices and Apple needs to take action in order not to lose the markets. According to some sources, the company’s manufacturing partners from Taiwan will start producing the iPhone 5S;  it is said to have performed different trials in December and it is expected to be launched in  Q1 or Q2 of 2013.