A few days ago I told you that in China some merchants are already taking pre-orders for the iPhone 5 terminal which will be launched by Apple in the fall of this year. At that time I did not have much information about the offer, but in the meantime those from Reuters they took up the subject, went to China and found out that the Taobao website takes pre-orders for iPhone 5, sellers asking for amounts between $160 and $1200 for a pre-order. For now, it seems that there are several dozen people interested in buying the new device, so sellers can easily raise several tens of thousands of dollars until the official launch in the fall.
Apple Inc's next-generation iPhone has not even been released yet, but opportunistic sellers on China's largest e-commerce platform, Taobao, are already accepting pre-orders, complete with mock-up pictures and purported technical specifications. Sellers on Taobao, a unit of Alibaba Group, are accepting orders for the iPhone 5, in some cases asking for a deposit of 1,000 yuan ($160) for the new phone. One seller, "Dahai99888", who started accepting pre-orders this week, is asking for full payment upfront, at a cool 6,999 yuan ($1,100).
Regarding the method of bringing the iPhones to China, the sellers say that the units will be bought from the US and Hong Kong at the official launch and then they will be brought to China, the country where Apple launches the new products a few months after international release. The idea of the Chinese is good considering that there the iPhone 5 will officially arrive more difficult, but in Europe or even in Romania such ideas are useless, considering that last year the iPhone 4S arrived just one month after the official launch, and the iPad 3 was released in Romania only 2 weeks after the official release.
Demand is high, yesterday someone just bought two phones. Altogether we have about two dozen orders. It's not so easy to bring the phones from overseas, there's a limit to how many you can carry in... If we could bring in a few thousand that would be great!
