People pass an Apple reseller store in Beijing on Tuesday. China is Apple’s second-biggest market, and its iPhones and other products — many of them made in the country — are highly popular, although it faces fierce competition from South Korea’s Samsung. SD-Agencies

APPLE Inc. CEO Tim Cook apologized to Chinese consumers after two weeks of being lambasted by Chinese media for arrogance and poor customer service.

Corporate mea culpas have become a rite of passage for international companies criticized by China Central Television, including Volkswagen AG, Carrefour SA and Yum! Brands Inc.

After the March 15 report on CCTV, China’s commerce market watchdog pledged to strengthen regulations concerning infringements of customer’s rights. The State Administration for Industry and Commerce asked local authorities to increase their supervision of clauses in Apple’s warranty policies.

“It is completely normal for the Apple company to apologize to Chinese consumers, and I think such action is commendable,” Hong Lei, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, said in Beijing on Tuesday.

Apple will now offer full replacements of iPhone 4 and 4S models, and the warranty will be reset to one year at that point, Cook said in a letter posted on the company’s Chinese website. Previously, the company provided new parts attached to the back of the customer’s existing iPhone, and didn’t extend the warranty.

Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s largest maker of smartphones, repairs or replaces individual parts and will reset the warranty if it replaces the entire device within the initial one-year period, said Chris Jung, a Seoul-based spokesman.

Apple also vowed to improve training, customer service and monitoring of stores authorized to sell its products in China.

Yin Wen, producer of the CCTV show, said the network wasn’t told by the government to target Apple, and the reason why People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, published several follow-up articles on the issue was because “Apple has stirred public anger.”

China is Apple’s biggest market outside the United States, accounting for US$22.8 billion in sales in fiscal 2012. The Cupertino, California-based company sold more than 2 million iPhone 5 models the first weekend they went on sale in China.

“We don’t differentiate between foreign and Chinese enterprises when picking which companies to expose,” Yin said. “We picked Apple because we received a lot of consumer complaints, so we sent reporters to investigate the issue.”

Yin said the show’s focus is consumer protection, so issues such as pollution are “irrelevant.”

Since the day of the broadcast, the People’s Daily website has published about the same number of articles on Apple as it has on the pigs found in Shanghai’s Huangpu River.

Apple needed to address the situation because the intensity of scrutiny from State media was more severe than in the cases of other foreign brands, said Mark Natkin, managing director of Marbridge Consulting Ltd., a market research firm in Beijing.

Last year, Carrefour apologized and shut an outlet in central Henan Province after CCTV reported it altered labels for meat production dates. Yum, owner of the KFC food chain, apologized in January after the State broadcaster said a supplier provided chicken meat with too much antibiotics. (SD-Agencies)

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