Bad news for Apple: Chinese teens don’t want to spend more than $150 on a phone

Photo credit: Harold Groven.

While the average Chinese shopper is becoming more carefree when it’s time to buy a new phone, China’s teens are counting their pennies a lot more carefully.

Most Chinese teens have smartphones that cost up to US$130. That’s in contrast to adults, about 51 percent of whom have phones that cost from US$150 to US$450, according to data released this week by local search engine giant Baidu.

The result is bad news for Apple. Because of budget constraints for most, the iPhone is the eighth most popular smartphone brand among the nation’s teens – as opposed to the fourth most popular with everyone else in China.

Youngsters in the US, meanwhile, are wild about their iPhones. 69 percent of American teens surveyed earlier this year by Piper Jaffray said they’re iPhone owners – a figure that’s up from the year prior.

Xiaomi hanging in there

Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, Samsung, and Vivo are the five most used brands of the mini-millennials. That’s some succor for Xiaomi at a time when most of the country’s phone buyers are trading up to ever pricier models. The average phone price in China rose to US$319 last year, up from US$260 in 2014, shows data from Canalys.

Xiaomi’s Mi Note (left) next to the iPhone 6.

In its report, Baidu compares and contrasts China’s “post-00s” generation – people aged up to 16 – with everyone else. The data is mostly pulled from some of the 120 million active users of its Baidu Mobile Assistant app, with some parts put together from a mobile survey of 5,819 users.

Fewer apps

Here are a few more findings about China’s teens and their phones:

• They use fewer apps than the average person. 70 percent of the teens have up to 30 apps, compared to 64.7 percent of everyone else.
• They’re much more likely to be using the phone for streaming music, video, gaming, and snapping pics. And of course for studying. Adults are a lot more keen on social media, shopping, and news than the kids.
• Gaming skews heavily to teen boys.
• 84 percent are on Android. Just six percent on iOS. There’s no data on the remaining 10 percent.
• Girls more likely to be hooked on their phones, with 35 percent spending five hours or more per day on them – compared to 30 percent of the boys.
• Adults, however, spend more time on their phones than the teens. Perhaps there’s too much homework to get done.

Converted from Chinese yuan. Rate: US$1 = RMB 6.68.