As an absolute number, 2 million of just about anything sold over the course of three days is impressive. However, Apple’s China iPhone 5 sales are a different enumeration entirely, which will be parsed and picked over with a fine toothed comb.

Apple has announced that China iPhone 5 sales topped 2 million units over the weekend.

“Customer response to iPhone 5 in China has been incredible, setting a new record with the best first weekend sales ever in China,” said Tim Cook, CEO. “China is a very important market for us and customers there cannot wait to get their hands on Apple products.”

For what it’s worth, Apple sold more than 5 million iPhone 5s over the first weekend of sales in US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and the UK, which together have a population of about 720 million. That said, although China’s population is more than 1.3 billion, middle and upper class folks only account for about 500 million of the total.

That’s a fair amount of fudging, but extending the math a little farther, you get one iPhone 5 for every 144 people in the advanced economies of the first launch weekend and one iPhone 5 for every 250 middle and upper income people in China.

Of course, the iPhone isn’t a three-day event in either of these “regions,” so the sales will continue and mount with time.

With China’s economic growth running at multiples of the advanced economies year-after-year, the size of the Middle Kingdom’s middle class alone will soon equal the total population of all Western countries. No wonder Tim Cook puts so much emphasis on China…

What’s your take?

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