While Apple has an ever-increasing presence in China, the world's largest cell phone carrier based there is still curiously deficient on offering an iPhone -- but that may change as executives from the two companies sit down for a chat.
Reuters is reporting that Apple CEO Tim Cook is in China this week, where he sat down Thursday for a one-on-one pow-wow with China Mobile chairman Xi Guohua to discuss "matters of cooperation," a spokesman for the carrier told the news agency via email.
That's about all we're likely to know about the meeting thanks to signed confidentiality agreements and Apple's notorious penchant for secrecy, but it's not hard to imagine that a key topic was how to get the iPhone onto the last remaining carrier holdout in China.
While Apple already has lucrative deals in place with China Unicom and China Telecom, China Mobile is by far the largest carrier in the country -- let alone the entire world -- with 703 million subscribers. That's a significant number of potential iPhone users, even for a device that's sold more than 250 million units to date.
The problem, however, is China Mobile's 3G network is incompatible with the rest of the world, which many believe is the reason Apple has not created an iPhone specific for that region and instead appears to be waiting for the carrier's network to be "commercially viable."
A deal with China Mobile is said to be a shot in the arm for the iPhone's future growth at a time when many Chinese users have switched to smartphones offered by competitors Samsung and Lenovo.
Cook also noted that Apple currently has 11 stores in the Greater China region in addition to a number of resellers, but the company plans to expand further in the future, with more than 25 stores in total.
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