Apple to open 5 New Retail Stores in China Next Month

Apple is going to open five new shops in China in the next five weeks. And Apple is said to be hiring for 15 new locations.

Apple has finally decided to expand its operation in one of the fastest growing economy of the world, China. Apple has started to open five new stores in China in the coming weeks.

Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s senior vice president of retail and online stores told Xinhua that the company is going to open five new stores before the Chinese New Year this year and out of the five four of them are in new cities where Apple did not have its presence.

From these five stores the first was opened last Saturday in Zhengzhou the capital of central China’s Henan Province. Moreover the next shop that Apple will be opening is located in Hangzhou which is in Zhejiang Province, near Shanghai and it is scheduled to open on January 24.

The Spring festival or the Chinese lunar New Year falls on February 19th this time and it is known as the most vibrant shopping season for the Chinese people. By the way China has a population of more than 1.3 billion which shows why Apple is so interested to expand its operations there.

When Apple is done with the opening of these five new shops the total of Apple shops in China will reach 20. The company had opened its first store in Beijing in 2008 and that is how it started its operations into China.

Tim Cook the CEO of Apple had already revealed last October that the company was going to increase its operations in China by opening 40 retail outlets within two years. 

Angela Ahrendts stated that Apple has been hiring in China but there is still a challenge. The challenge she explained was keeping up with the demand while providing the same global customer service standards.

Although she did not reveal the sites of the other three Apple stores but we have a vague idea to where these might be. This is due to Apple’s China website which has listed store jobs in 15 places.

These places include Inner Mongolia, Shandong, Shanxi, Tianjin, Anhui, Guizhou and Hebei. Now what is interesting is that all of these places do not have an Apple store and so make them the best options for the new stores.

Moreover the busiest global store that Apple has is also situated in China in the city of Shanghai which receives more than 25000 visitors a day. 

Now since 2012 Apple China has been expanding its roots in the Chinese market. The company has increased its service staff by 75 percent with over 3700 retail employees in the country.

Plus China is Apple’s second largest market and so it is just normal to expect such expansion by Apple in the country. China today is the biggest market for every company in the world and as Ahrendts stated that it has become very important for companies to be present in China in order to increase their sales volume. 

Apple has also been receiving quite positive results on its online store in China and Ahrendts stated that the online store in China has the greatest number of sales. It is obvious as more than 632 million people in China use the Internet.  

So it seems that Apple is smart enough to expand in China and take advantage of the huge market that the country has in order to increase its sales volume and market share.