Apple made large concessions to China Unicom : 5 million iPhones to China

China Unicom has been selected as the sole distributor of iPhones in China, according to a report in the International Business Times today. While the deal has yet to be finalized, the company has purchased 5 million WCDMA iPhones without Wi-Fi from Apple at a price of 10 billion yuan (US$1.46 billion).

As for the iPhone, it is expected to sell for $350 and $700 for the 8GB and the 16GB versions respectively in China. The phone will obviously face stiff competition from well endowed similar looking clones (remember the Meizu MB, anyone?) that makes the iPhone look like an expensive brick. Then there are the new Android oPhone based phones, including the Dell one that is expected to land there soon.

The International Business Times report notes that Apple made large concessions to China Unicom in order to enter the massive Chinese market. To give some scale to the size of this sale, Apple reported during the 3Q 2009 conference call with Wall Street analysts that they had sold a total of 5.2 million iPhones in the last quarter.