Apple's foldable opens for preorder October 16, and in China its AI is Alibaba's
Days before iPhone Duo preorders open, China's telecom regulator cleared Alibaba's Qwen and Wanxiang models to run inside Apple's newest handsets. Apple finally gets AI into the world's largest smartphone market, and the models doing the work are Alibaba's, just as Huawei takes share and Apple's Pro orders get contested.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology updated the iPhone Duo's network-access permit on September 29 to add registration numbers for Apple+0.65% — Apple, up 0.65 percent today Intelligence, Alibaba's−0.57% — Alibaba, down 0.57 percent today Tongyi Qianwen and Tongyi Wanxiang, with the iPhone 18 Pro and several earlier models also updated 12. Apple Intelligence has run in the United States since 2024 and never shipped on the Chinese mainland 13.
Qwen is Alibaba Cloud's family of large language models; Wanxiang generates images and video 1. Tim Cook, Apple's executive chairman, said in Shanghai that a mainland beta arrives in late October with live translation, writing tools and photo cleanup, and no revamped Siri 12. Bloomberg reports the full release comes in December with iOS 27.3, still without Siri AI 3.
Apple is defending a market that shrank 15.4 percent
Preliminary data from market-research firm IDC puts China's third-quarter smartphone shipments at 57.9 million units, down 15.4 percent year on year, the sixth straight quarterly decline, as memory and component costs pushed retail prices up across the world's largest smartphone market 45.
Huawei shipped 12.2 million phones for a 21 percent share, up 17 percent on its trifold and Mate 90 launches, the only top brand to grow 14. Apple held second at 17.8 percent, down 4.3 percent 4. Market-research firm Counterpoint saw a better launch week: iPhone 18 Pro three-day sales beat the iPhone 17 Pro's entire first week by 12 percent, and Apple took 33 percent of sales for September 14 to 20 6.
Huawei was the only top brand to grow as China's phone market fell 15.4%
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Huawei | 17% |
| Apple | -4.3% |
| China total | -15.4% |
| OPPO | -17.6% |
| Xiaomi | -20.4% |
| vivo | -24.9% |
The Duo lift is a supply-chain figure, not a preorder count
China's Securities Times reports Apple raised iPhone Duo orders about 30 percent shortly before preorders open on October 16, with the total still below 10 million units; neither the order lift nor the $1,999 start price is confirmed by Apple 7.
The same report reads the Pro line as a mix shift, iPhone 18 Pro down 10 to 15 percent and Pro Max up as much, against earlier Nikkei accounts of cuts and analyst notes flagging weak Pro Max demand 78. Counterpoint projects roughly 6 million foldable iPhones shipped in 2026, about a quarter of the global foldable market 7. On one point every account agrees: the fall lineup leans on the Duo.
Alibaba's prize is placement, then an earnings test
Alibaba closed October 9 at $111.37 on its New York-listed ADSs, American depositary shares in the underlying stock, about 38 percent below its October 29, 2025, high of $179.97 9. JPMorgan cut its target to $200 from $210 on October 12, keeping its Overweight rating, the bank's buy-equivalent, for about 81 percent implied upside 9.
The route runs through cloud: revenue from AI and compute services grew 45 percent in the June quarter, the twelfth straight quarter of triple-digit AI product growth, and analysts expect above 50 percent for the September quarter, due at the next earnings report 9.
Wall Street's Alibaba targets run 60 to 81 percent above the share price
- Estimate
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Close, 9 Oct | $111.37 |
| BofA target (estimate) | $178 |
| Consensus, 39 analysts (estimate) | $186 |
| JPMorgan target (estimate) | $200 |
What decides the trade
A $200 price implies roughly 25 times forward earnings, near Alibaba's five-year peak multiple of 25.3, and consensus expects normalized earnings per ADS to climb from RMB 26.80 in fiscal 2026 to RMB 62.15 by fiscal 2028 9.
The permit says nothing about money: no terms between Apple and Alibaba are public, so Qwen's revenue contribution stays unproven until Alibaba's September-quarter earnings report. Watch the Duo preorder tally after October 16, the late-October beta, and iOS 27.3 in December 3.
Apple analyst Gene Munster's bull case, 100 million users paying $20 a month for a premium Siri, about $24 billion a year, cannot run in China: Siri AI is the one feature the approval leaves out 83.
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
