苹果新CEO首份财报：中国营收大涨21%

(II) Apple Reports a Strong China Comeback Under Its New CEO

John Ternus’s first earnings call as Apple’s CEO came with a reassuring message about China: the market is doing considerably better than some analysts expected.

Apple’s Q4 revenue in China rose 21% year over year, contributing to a 28% increase for the full fiscal year. The mainland market also recorded its highest number of iPhone upgrades, despite a relatively weak consumer environment.

Demand for the new iPhone Duo remains strong, although supply constraints could limit how many devices Apple can ship. That makes the early display problems particularly awkward: Apple has a new product generating considerable interest, but it also needs to make sure the manufacturing quality can keep up.Hi friends,

You wouldn’t normally expect the biggest China-related tech story of the week to involve Jensen Huang’s love life. But here we are.

The woman involved in his alleged affair has reportedly been accused of being a Chinese spy. Yes, somehow even a cheating scandal involving Nvidia’s CEO has become a China story.

At this point, it’s getting hard to tell where Silicon Valley gossip ends and the AI cold war begins. And this week’s news has plenty of examples.

Beyond the headlines, there’s a strange contradiction running through China’s tech industry right now. The country wants its AI models to travel further, its robots to become more capable, and its manufacturers to move up the global value chain. But the more ambitious these plans become, the harder it gets to separate technological progress from the business and political realities around it.

Take AI. Chinese labs are making increasingly capable open models, but they’re also starting to think harder about what happens when those models get into the wrong hands. Regulators, meanwhile, want to know which technologies are leaving the country and who will control them once they do.

The same tension is showing up in robotics. Meta has gone all the way to Shanghai to work with a Chinese manufacturer on a humanoid robot prototype. The engineering advantages are obvious. The long-term business relationship is much less certain.

It’s a busy week for an industry that’s trying to move forward while navigating some pretty complicated constraints.

Anyway, let’s take a look.

Weekly News...

(I) The iPhone Duo Screen Crack Mystery Gets Another Suspect

The investigation into the iPhone Duo’s display failures is getting more complicated. Our recent supply-chain analysis points to the phone’s Metal Injection Molding (MIM) hinge reinforcements as a possible source of the problem.

Under physical stress or tight structural tolerances, tiny metal fragments from these components could potentially break free and puncture the OLED panel. South Korean supplier Fine M-Tec has denied that its components are responsible, while pointing to other companies in the hinge supply chain, including Amphenol, Shin Zu Shing, and several Chinese suppliers.

The important detail is that the hinge is a multi-supplier assembly. Finding the actual cause will require more than identifying one component that sits near the damaged display. For now, the MIM theory remains an engineering hypothesis, not a confirmed root cause.

(II) Apple Reports a Strong China Comeback Under Its New CEO

John Ternus’s first earnings call as Apple’s CEO came with a reassuring message about China: the market is doing considerably better than some analysts expected.

Apple’s Q4 revenue in China rose 21% year over year, contributing to a 28% increase for the full fiscal year. The mainland market also recorded its highest number of iPhone upgrades, despite a relatively weak consumer environment.

Demand for the new iPhone Duo remains strong, although supply constraints could limit how many devices Apple can ship. That makes the early display problems particularly awkward: Apple has a new product generating considerable interest, but it also needs to make sure the manufacturing quality can keep up.

(III) Tencent Is Spending Big on ByteDance's Seedance

Imagine Meta becoming one of the biggest customers of OpenAI’s API. Something similar is happening in China: Tencent has reportedly become one of the top three domestic customers of ByteDance’s Seedance video-generation model, measured by token spending. Bilibili has also made the global top 10.

The overseas business is growing even faster. Seedance’s international revenue has reportedly increased around fivefold in six months, with overseas markets now accounting for roughly half of total sales.

There’s something particularly interesting about Tencent paying to use a model developed by one of its biggest rivals. In the AI market, competition doesn’t necessarily stop companies from becoming customers of one another. When a model is good enough, even a rival may decide it’s cheaper to use it than build everything from scratch.

(IV) BYD Is Turning an Old Ford Factory Into a Brazilian Manufacturing Hub

Five years after Ford left manufacturing in Brazil, BYD is turning its former Camaçari site into a major production base for Latin America.

The company’s local market share reportedly jumped from 4.2% to 9.7% in a year, while sales surged 138% year over year in October. BYD is now moving beyond assembling semi-knocked-down kits and toward more complete local manufacturing, including stamping and welding.

The ambition is to challenge established players such as Fiat and Volkswagen by 2030.

This is an important step in BYD’s overseas strategy. Exporting cars can help a company enter a market quickly, but building a local manufacturing base creates deeper roots: more local jobs, closer supplier relationships, and potentially better resilience against tariffs and trade barriers. Brazil could become much more than another destination for Chinese EV exports.

(V) 600,000 Nvidia H200 Chips Are Waiting in Hong Kong

Here’s an unexpected twist in the chip war: according to Reuters, around 600,000 Nvidia H200 AI chips are sitting in warehouses in Hong Kong, waiting for approval to enter mainland China.

The bottleneck reportedly isn’t...

Continue Reading