Comment by qwezxcrty
2 days ago
I'm not really against your point but I just quickly checked (and it agrees with my personal observation), iPhone have been the very most popular phone brand in China for many years and recently the market share grew beyond 25%. I would not say that's not big enough to matter.
You're confusing recent sales figures with overall market shares. Both Tesla and Apple use this neat little trick to their advantage, not just in China, but also in the EU and I'm sure in other places.
They both sell only like 2-3 models at a time, always heavily preferencing one of them in marketing, and then use that to claim they have the "best selling phone in the market". Which is true, but is not the same as having that percentage of the overall market share as a brand.
Nearly every Tesla sale is a Model Y sale, and nearly every Apple sale is an iPhone 17 sale. This does not apply to other brands such as BYD, Geely, Huawei, Oppo, (Samsung, Volkswagen,) where you can walk into a store and pick between about a dozen models targeting different niches.
On top of that, Apple just started selling iPhone 17, so yes, if you Google it, you find out that they've "reached 25% of the Chinese market" and not realise that this is what happens every Q4 simply because that's when they start selling new models. That is not the same as having 25% of the overall market share at all. Overall, both Tesla and Apple are around fifth most popular brands.