iPhone Clones For Sale
09.12.07 - 12:18pm
Iphones are showing just how popular they are in the Asian market, as it is currently being flooded with fake and unlocked iPhones.
The unlocked phones are selling for $771 for the 4GB and $1037 for the 8GB with swapped out SIM cards.The Shanghai Morning Post reported on one vender who sells seven to eight of the illegal units a week. “Though they are more expensive than ordinary handsets, they are really popular,” said the booth owner.
Those that aren’t buying the “unlocked” real iPhones may be buying knockoffs, which sell for quite a bit less than the real phones. They began selling in China as early as last December, when the iPhone was first announced.
Ben, who spoke to Bloomberg News sells the fake handsets. He said they are produced in batches of 1,000 at a factory in Shenzhen China. The counterfeiters buy the parts from local companies and then assemble the phones. “The guts aren’t hard,” Ben said. “The hard part is the design and the exterior.” He says his operation has sold more than 10,000 clones in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and the U.S. (I wonder if you can buy it on the streets of New York along with a Prada purse.)
The phones end up looking just like the iPhone with the Apple logo on the back and all. They sell for around $270 mostly online and work with Chinese carriers. “What I’m selling is a Chinese iPhone,” says Ni who sells the phones in Shanghai. “It’s not a fake iPhone. It works perfectly fine.”
Nokian phones and Snog Ericsson phones are other knockoffs that are being sold. “By some accounts, they may make up 5 percent to 10 percent of total volumes this year,” said Neil Mawston, an analyst for the Strategy Analytics in London.
Manufacturers such as the Hon Hai Precision Industry, which makes the iPhone, say they do not participate in the black market trade and fire anyone caught selling the designs or component parts. Nevertheless the designs are copied at such a rapid rate in China that phone companies are revealing only part of their new phones or only behind closed doors when they pre-show them in places such as Hong Kong.
The iPhone is not set to be released in Asia for another year, and there is no date on when it will be released in China. At the rate the knockoffs and unlocked iPhones are being sold however, all who really want one may have one by the time it gets there. “The longer Apple delays, the more the pirates can rip the company off,” says Chialin Lu, an analyst at Yuanta Core Pacific Securities Co. in Taipei.
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