Interesting report out of China that the iPhone isn’t really catching up with Samsung’s line of smartphones. Apple has a new carrier in China, China Telecom Corp., but Samsung’s lead in the market just keeps growing and  no one expects Apple to catch Samsung any time soon.

From Bloomberg:

Succeeding in China is important for Apple as shipments of smartphones in the country are projected to jump 52 percent this year to 137 million units, overtaking the U.S. for the first time as the world’s biggest market. Unlike Samsung’s strategy of partnering with all carriers, Apple has limited its own success by not making a device compatible with the nation’s biggest operator, China Mobile Ltd..

Samsung works with all the major carriers in China but Apple chose a more limited approach, much like it did here in launching with just AT&T:

Apple chose not to make a phone with China Mobile because the operator had a unique 3G standard called TD-SCDMA, even after the Chinese company’s Chairman Wang Jianzhou met with the then Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs in early 2010. Wang told the company’s annual meeting in May that he didn’t expect Apple to introduce an iPhone until the carrier rolled out the fourth- generation TD-LTE network by end of this year.

As I understand it, also, and this is unconfirmed, there are a lot of people in China.