China's economy is looking very shaky these days, creating potential trouble for all sorts of major companies.
China is the world's biggest smartphone market thanks to millions of new customers, who purchased their first phones in the last few years. That rising tide had lifted almost all the smartphone players, but those days of growth are over.
No sweat, says Apple CEO Tim Cook.
"I can tell you that we have continued to experience strong growth for our business in China through July and August," Cook wrote to CNBC stock analyst Jim Cramer recently.
As a matter of fact, Cook took the opportunity for a bit of a victory lap: ""Growth in iPhone activations has actually accelerated over the past few weeks, and we have had the best performance of the year for the App Store in China during the last 2 weeks."
There's no such rosy sentiment coming from rival smartphone-maker Samsung.
Having already endured months of profit declines, Samsung is now bearing the brunt of a stock selloff that has wiped about $44 billion from its value since April -- $12 billion of that from August alone.
[seealso slug=http://sale-online.click/2015/04/29/samsung-turnaround/%5D%3C/p%3E%3Cp%3ESamsung's struggling smartphone division has showed few signs of turning things around. And with China's economy faltering, it's hard to gain any Tim Cook-style optimism.
The Chinese market is now saturated, with the great majority of the market replacing phones as opposed to buying their first. As a result, smartphone shipments -- in important indicator of how companies see future demand - have fallen.
That slowdown was inevitable but could get a lot worse. China is in the midst of a serious stock market crash that has been so bad that companies have voluntarily stopped their shares from trading and caused the government to arrest hundreds of people including traders and journalists.
The overall Chinese economy isn't looking much better, with slowing growth causing concern about a broader global slowdown.
This couldn't come at a worse time for Samsung. The company is still a major player in the smartphone industry, but it has been trending downward for quite a while. Profit has steadily declined for more than a year while facing competition from all angles. On the high end, Apple is a formidable competitor to say the least. On the low end, upstarts like Xiaomi and Huawei have been introducing cheaper phones that have been a hit with consumers.
Apple has fared far better in China than Samsung lately. Samsung smartphone shipments to the country declined by 50% from the fourth quarter of 2013 to 2014, while Apple's nearly doubled, according to research firm IDC.
If that trend continues, China's slowdown could end up being markedly worse for Samsung than Apple or even competitors like Xiaomi and Huawei, which have been steadily growing market share in China and abroad.
Samsung isn't without its own popular devices, but they don't appear to be enough to pull the company out of its dive. The new devices -- including a iPhone 6 Plus competitor -- debuted to broadly positive reviews, but the price tags put Samsung's flagship products right alongside Apple's at the top of the industry.