APPLE Inc. said its iPhone 6 and 6 Plus were still available for sale in China after Beijing’s intellectual property regulators barred their sales saying the designs had infringed a patent held by a little-known Shenzhen company.

    “We appealed an administrative order from a regional patent tribunal in Beijing last month and as a result the order has been stayed pending review by the Beijing IP Court,” Apple said in a statement Friday.

    The Beijing Intellectual Property Bureau ruled that Apple’s previous-generation smartphones, released in September 2014, violated an external-design patent held by Chinese device maker Shenzhen Baili for its 100C model.

    Shares of the California tech giant tumbled 2.3 percent to US$95.33 Friday after the Beijing bureau barred the sale of the phones in Beijing.

    The Chinese market is vital to Apple, driving more of its sales than any other region outside the United States. But the tech giant has faced greater scrutiny here in recent months, with its online book and film services blocked by Chinese regulators earlier this year. Some tech analysts downplayed the significance of the news, noting that Apple already plans to stop selling the iPhone 6 models in China by early fall when the appeal ends, as the new iPhone 7 will be released around the same time.

    “It would likely be no more than a 2 to 3 percent iPhone unit headwind, or a 1 to 2 percent revenue headwind, just for the September quarter,” Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said in a Friday note. (SD-Agencies)