Pah! Who needs an iPhone, anyway? Another launch from Apple has passed without a deal for China Mobile to sell its handsets. When you have 700m subscribers, or more than twice the total number of phones Apple has sold worldwide in the past four years, it would be easy enough to think adding the American superstar does not really matter. But for China Mobile it does.

China Mobile already has perhaps 25m iPhone users, thinks HSBC. That is a big number given that its 3G network is incompatible with the phones. This means that a group larger than the population of Australia wants an iPhone badly enough to put up with a patchwork of 2G and WiFi. That sort of desire suggests worries about the iPhone’s cost pricing it out of the Chinese market could be overdone, even if Apple’s cheaper 5C phone will cost more in China than its new top-of-the-range 5S will in the US.

China Mobile is hardly sitting still. It is helped by a lack of number portability, meaning that users who want a new iPhone – available from its smaller rivals China Telecom and China Unicom – must face the hassle of a new number. China Mobile’s revenue from data has risen a very nice 25 per cent in the past year. But its data traffic, according to HSBC, grew 129 per cent over that period. Traffic and sales growth never quite match but this extreme mismatch underlines the cost to China Mobile of its 3G troubles – it uses a China-only standard – which it covers up with low-margin WiFi.