Analysts: Apple's China Mobile Deal Will Add 17M To 30M In Incremental iPhone Sales

Apple AAPL and China Mobile CHL are together at last.

Now one important question remains: what will this long-awaited deal mean for Apple's bottom line?

Analysts predict that Apple will sell as many as 30 million additional iPhone units in 2014.

"It's a positive and the market responded well," James Kelleher, Director of Research & Senior Analyst at Argus Research, told Benzinga. "I would say it's going to be incrementally worth 20 million to 30 million new phones."

Kelleher said that this sales increase would be in addition to the many jailbroken iPhones already on China Mobile.

Shebly Seyrafi, the Managing Director at FBN Securities, is a little more conservative in his estimate. He expects Apple to sell 17 million additional iPhones in 2014.

"We see upside to the extent that the 4G buildup at China Mobile is greater or faster than expected," Seyrafi told Benzinga. "Before we had 192 million iPhones shipped in calendar '14, and we've raised that by 17 million."

Seyrafi was particularly impressed by China Mobile's plans to increase its 4G base stations.

"There are currently 42 million China Mobile subscribers who use the iPhone," said Seyrafi. "China Mobile currently has about 170 million 3G/4G subs. I think that is going to ramp up significantly over the next year, because when you think about what they said in the press release, currently China Mobile has 1.2 million 2G, 3G and 4G base stations. They're gonna increase that by 500,000, all 4G, by the end of calendar '14. So there's going to be significant 4G buildup at China Mobile."

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Andy Hargreaves, the Senior Research Analyst of Digital Media at Pacific Crest Securities, did not provide an estimate for how many iPhones would be sold through China Mobile. But he (like most analysts) is positive on the news.

"They'll sell more iPhones," Hargreaves told Benzinga. "They'll definitely sell more iPhones."

At press time, Apple was up more than three percent.

China Mobile was up two percent.

Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Louis Bedigian had no position in the equities mentioned in this report.