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Hong Kong. Apple is set to exponentially grow its China business as the country’s No.1 and No.3 telecommunication operators jostle to stitch up deals to sell Apple’s iPhone in the world’s largest mobile phone market, home to more than 900 million subscribers.

China Unicom is currently the sole operator offering Apple’s sleek feature-filled smartphones, but it is only a matter of time before No.1 operator China Mobile and No.3 China Telecom follow suit, analysts said.

“The biggest winner will be Apple. While the operators may be forced to subsidize the iPhone to users, Apple will still get the price it wanted from all the operators no matter what,” said Alex Chau, a senior research manager at research firm IDC Asia Pacific.

Apple’s chief operating officer Tim Cook said last week that the maker of the iPhone and iPad was merely “scratching the surface” in China.

Asia Pacific, which now accounts for about one-fifth of Apple’s total revenue, and Greater China in particular helped drive its revenue up by 82 percent to $28.6 billion between April and June.

China’s voracious appetite for all things Apple was on display last week when an American blogger living in Kunming, in the country’s isolated southwest, unearthed an elaborate fake Apple store. Apple has just four stores in China, but also sells its iPhone and other products through more than 100 resellers and China Unicom.

“We believe the success in China, and other emerging economies, has been fueled by iPhone growth,” PiperJaffray analysts said in a note. “Apple is succeeding with the iPhone in markets where they have not found great success with the Mac; moreover, we expect the company to extend this success with the iPad as the product line matures.”

Although China’s mobile market has grown rapidly, with 907 million mobile phone users — more than Europe’s entire population — as of the end of July, only 80 million are 3G users. The rest are low-end 2G subscribers who typically own cellphones to make calls only.

Morgan Stanley said in a report that Apple’s China sales could exceed $9 billion in the year ending September 2012, up from just $2.9 billion in the previous fiscal year, as more Chinese snap up iPhones and iPads to play games, write weibo — Chinese for microblogs — and make friends online.

Apple has about 9 percent of China’s smartphone market, ranking behind Nokia, China’s Yulong and Samsung Electronics, Gartner said.

China Unicom signed a three-year contract with Apple in 2009, and China Telecom is likely to be next, sources said this month. China Mobile is expected to wait until it unveils its more advanced 4G LTE (long-term evolution) technology in late 2012 or early 2013, as analysts said Apple was unlikely to make an iPhone that supported China Mobile’s current technology.

But even as Apple ramps up iPhone sales in China, smartphones running on Google’s Android operating system are still expected to dominate the market.

IDC expects Android phones to take half the market in 2015, as there are simply more vendors offering Android phones across all price categories.

Reuters