THECHINATECHLETTER: iPhone sales off to good start

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Michael Clendenin

I’ve been chasing China tech stories for nearly a decade. Spent several years in Taiwan covering semis and hardware firms in Greater China for the EE Times. Then moved on to Shanghai and into market research, which eventually led to a gig as a regional tech equity analyst for Hong Kong-based brokerage CLSA. Currently, I’m the principal analyst at RedTech Advisors. We help institutional investors and multinational IT firms make sense of Chinese tech trends, companies, consumers and government IT policy.
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THECHINATECHLETTER: iPhone sales off to good start

iPhone sales off to good start

Despite a disabled Wi-Fi function, the early feedback in the Chinese press indicates Apple's iPhone was a hot seller during its opening weekend of sales across China.

From the provincial capital of Kunming, Yunnan, in western China to Shenzhen and Shanghai in the southeast and Beijing in the north, all anecdotal reports indicate the iPhone's been well-received. Similar to the US, iPhone fans stood in long lines in some places to get there hands on a unit. No hard data has been released yet on unit sales; just lots of spot reports on a hundred units here and hundred there all being sold out.
China Unicom -- the official seller of the W-CDMA-based IPhone -- seems to have nailed the distribution pretty well. The phone is stocked across all the major provincial capitals and Tier 1 cities. In addition to Unicom services centers, it can also be bought at Gome, Suning, Best Buy and several other dealers. Unicom is offering the iPhone as a stand-alone purchase or with a two year contract. For the standalone: Rmb4999 (8GB-3G); Rmb5880 (16GB-3GS); Rmb6999 (32GB-3GS). The contract pricing is a little more complicated, but here's a baseline: Rmb3099 (8GB-3G); Rmb3999 (16GB-3GS); Rmb4999 (32GB-3GS). See this link for details.
In Shanghai, I stopped into a few stores to see how sales were going. Seems that most buyers preferred to buy the phone without the two-year contract from China Unicom. This is interesting, especially since with no Wi-Fi, the cellular data link is the only way to download data. It may indicate that people don't believe they will use data that much; or some may opt to use China Mobile's EDGE service, which is more widespread in China.