Apple's iPhone sales fell in China last year. Apple lost its position as the best-selling smartphone brand in this country to 2 local rivals.
One of Apple's limitations is that it has not been able to deploy Apple Intelligence in China, causing them to lose their competitive advantage.
Therefore, Apple has decided to join hands with Alibaba, one of China's leading e-commerce corporations, to deploy Apple Intelligence on iPhone, iPad and Mac in this country.
Information about the cooperation between Alibaba and Apple has caused the Chinese company's stock price to skyrocket this week; Alibaba's Chairman Joseph Tsai confirmed that Apple will use AI developed by Alibaba to sell iPhones in China.
At the World Government Summit in Dubai, UAE, Mr. Tsai said: "In China, due to regulatory issues and similar issues, Apple needs to cooperate with Chinese companies to develop AI.
Apple was very selective when talking to a number of companies in China and in the end, they chose to cooperate with us. We are very lucky and honored to do business with a great company like Apple.
According to the South China Morning Post, Apple has spoken with other Chinese technology companies, including Tencent Holdings and TikTok owner ByteDance, before collaborating with Alibaba.
Last year, Apple had a deal with Baidu, but it later broke down due to issues related to AI model development and user data access.
Alibaba has launched its latest Qwen2.5-Max major language model for the Lunar New Year holiday. Shortly after its release, the latest version of Qwen, now closed source code, ranked 7th on Chatbot Arena, a standard evaluation project developed by computer scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, surpassing DeepSeek-V3 based on a series of criteria.
According to a report by market research firm Canalys, last year, Apple accounted for 15% of the smartphone market share in China, behind Vivo with 17% and Huawei with 16%.
The data also shows that two other domestic brands, Oppo and Honor, also account for 15% in China.
