Alibaba on Thursday confirmed Recent cooperation reports with Apple set to bring AI features to iPhones sold in China. The deal is important for Apple, as iPhone sales have decreased distributed to the world’s largest smartphone market. The headset fell 11% annually in China, according to Apple’s latest profit report.
Apple “spoke with several companies in China,” Alibaba President Joseph Tsai said on Thursday during the Dubai World Government Summit. “Eventually they chose to work with us. They want to use our AI to feed their phones. We feel extremely honored to work with a large company like Apple.”
According to reports, Apple’s Earlier deal with China’s Baidu It is infected with issues that adapt AI to the search giant. Apple is also believed to have explored partnerships with ByTedance and Deepseek, before installing Alibaba. These types of corporate relationships are decisive for US companies such as Apple as they work for regulatory approval in China. Both Alibaba and Apple reportedly submitted the relevant materials to local authorities.
Prior to the most recent call of the company’s profits, CEO Tim Cook mentioned the absence of Apple Intelligence, the company’s AI genetic solution, as a factor that contributes to the slowdown in international sales.
“During the quarter of December, we saw that in the markets where we had unfolded Apple Intelligence, that the iPhone 16 family performance was stronger than those markets where we had not unfolded Apple Intelligence”, Executive said to CNBC.
The company has a bank in Apple Intelligence to drive the next important iPhone “Super Cycle” – a term referring to a dramatic increase in device sales. Apple’s speed and strategy for the release of its own AI genetic solution have prevented its growth, as Google continues to provide new Gemini features via Samsung phones, Pixel devices and various other Android offers.
Increased domestic competition has also eaten in China’s Apple market share. Vivo took the lead in the fourth quarter of last year, with 17% of the market, according to figure by the CANALYS research company. Huawei, who has seen a huge recovery after sanctions from the first Trump administration, increased by 37% annually, scoring a second position in 16% market share. Apple, which ordered 24% of the market at the same time last year, decreased to 15%, placing it third with a dead heat with Xiaomi and Oppo.
Apple is a banking for the Alibaba deal to help recover some of this market, but even if the corporate relationship goes through regulatory control, the future of China’s Apple is not clear. Invoices and commercial tensions are likely to further affect sales in the basic market.
The company has mainly evaluated Donald Trump during the president’s second term. The cooked donation $ 1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee in January. More recently, Apple followed Google’s lead by changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico in the Gulf of America in the MAPS application.
TechCrunch arrived at Apple for additional comments about the Alibaba deal.
TechCrunch has an AI -focused newsletter! Sign up here To get it in your inbox every Wednesday.
