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Any move made by Apple in China triggers a massive response, and upstream industries recently disclosed that the company might build a special-edition iPhone just for the Chinese market, in a bid to recover its losses in the price tier of around 5,000 yuan ($729) in the country, thepaper.cn reported on Tuesday.

The American tech giant has been trying to make changes to adapt to the Chinese market over the past few years. Analysts believe that different from Apple's founder Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, the current CEO of the company, believes in giving users whatever they want.

The information quickly triggered discussion on Chinese social media. So far, related topics have been read over 190 million times on Chinese microblogging website Weibo.

Apple may also replace face ID with an in-display fingerprint scanner to lower costs. No official release date has yet been given.

Li Yi, chief researcher at the Center for Internet Studies of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, noted that it's reasonable to expect that Apple will release this new model.

"It has launched cheaper iPhones before and even released dual-SIM models specifically for the Chinese market, so what's stopping it launching another version specifically tailored for China?" Li asked.

Sun Yanbiao, head of Mobile No. 1 Research Institute, said that the information is reliable, and the new model is likely to be launched this September.

He noted that users are gradually moving away from face ID, as the function has not been widely applied except for unlocking. On the contrary, it made the handset more expensive, he said.

Sun said that the Chinese model is indeed another strategy that Apple is applying to cope with the current market. It has to hit the market with more products as its recently launched models were not innovative enough, he noted.

However, even if Apple does manage to regain users when it releases the model this September, these users will not be able to enjoy 5G services when the latest network technology is applied in 2020, Sun said.