As iPhone 15 arrives, China denies government ban on Apple’s phones

Using a USB 3 cable with iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max enables incredibly fast transfer speeds.

No sooner has the curtain closed on Apple’s iPhone 15 reveal than China speaks up to deny recent allegations it ordered government officials to stop using iPhones. Those widely reported claims caused Apple’s stock to take a dive, good news for speculators, I suppose.

China refutes iPhone ban claims

“China hasn’t issued any laws, regulations or policy documents banning purchase or use of foreign phones including Apple’s iPhones,” Mao Ning, a spokesperson at China’s foreign ministry is reported to have said.

That’s not to say China isn’t concerned at iPhone security.

The spokesperson confirmed it had noticed recent reports concerning this.

I’m willing to speculate those reports may presumably relate to the appearance of yet another insidious zero-click hack from the mercenaries at NSO Group. That such attacks exit at all surely means many high-value targets already use Lockdown Mode.

Security is an international problem

The very existence of such exploits threaten everyone’s use of digital tech, and if we know of a handful of them it’s reasonable to think well-resourced nations such as China, the US and others are aware of more.

The fact these exist, are exploited, and not shared because competing security teams don’t trust each other enough to work together against them constitutes a zero-win game for all concerned, which is why Apple patches any such flaws once it identifies them.

But damage was done

What the claims of a Chinese government ban did achieve was to dramatically depress Apple shares by around 6% in the lead-up to the iPhone 15 launch.

This forced analysts to consider how exposed iPhone sales might be as a result of a ban, and while opinions varied, Morgan Stanley analyst, Erik Woodring may have got it righter, when he described the likely impact as “more bark than bite”.

Apple is strong in China where the average iPhone owner has 2.5 Apple devices and commands an 80% retention rate. If China were to limit Apple’s access to its own market that may cost the company around 20% of its operating profit, but Woodring felt this to be unlikely.

Mutual benefit

“While China is critical to Apple’s success, Apple is also critical to the Chinese economy, and therefore while the potential for a broad decoupling between Apple and China in this multipolar world clearly exists, we don’t believe recent headlines are necessarily foreshadowing this “worst case” scenario,” he wrote in a note to clients.

“As a result, we’d conclude Apple’s recent stock move is indeed overdone as it implies Apple loses ~70% of its iPhone shipments in China, a highly draconian and unlikely scenario.”

That the Chinese government this morning saw fit to pull back on claims of some kind of additional ban suggests that while a draconian scenario remains possible, China is not yet ready to press forward with it.

Though as tensions between the superpowers rise, it may be fair to see the whole affair as China flexing its economic muscle in an unspoken plea for nations to work together toward mutual benefit, rather than slipping further into nativist nationalism in response to a broken economic model. Peace, after all, is good for business. We need more of it.

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