According to the Apple latest financial report, Asian Pacific region sales boosted 247% to $6.3 billion, and Apple now only have four stores in China. The company said it plans to expand 25 stores in Asia-Pacific region for next five years. All that means Asia already becomes the very important market for Apple.
Actually Apple has been criticized that it took too long to enter the China market, before if Chinese people wanted to buy Apple stuffs they must through Apple Authorized Reseller to buy, but sometimes it may have some risk, the service is not the same, and employee education is not so high quality, sometimes they even bought the fake one but they didn't know.
Now China has four Apple Stores and those stores became so popular, when iPad 2 released there even had a fight in front of Beijing Apple Store, Apple knows China market has huge potentiality, Apple briefly talked about the "greater China" idea when it announced the financial report on July 11, 2011, the COO Tim Cook said "We consider greater China to be Mainland China + Hong Kong + Taiwan. Sales 6x year-over-year. This quarter, revenue $3.8b from Greater China. $8.8b over last 3 quarters from Greater China. "We believe this is a substantial opportunity for Apple and we're just scratching the surface."
From this point I can predict that next few years Apple may consider to open one store in Taiwan, the best location Apple can get, we all know Apple is very serious about the location, they can wait for several years or pay higher rent to get the best location. Actually I'm from Taiwan, and before I came to IIT to pursue my MBA degree I got a job in Apple Taiwan, they planned to open apple shop in center Taiwan. The shop outlet is completely the same with Best Buy's Apple shop, even the chairs, tables, and demo videos, apple is very strict about this, you can't even judge or customization those things, so we can know Apple is very centralized and it wants to keep the quality of store, user experience, employee education the same. Because I research a lot in Apple, so I predict boldly that Apple will open the retail store in Taiwan within two years.
