iPhone 6 resellers lose out as Hong Kong supplies flood mainland markets
Dealers in the mainland's grey market for smartphones say they have lost heavily by betting on Apple's new iPhone 6.
Dealers in the mainland's grey market for smartphones say they have lost heavily by betting on Apple's new iPhone 6. They blame an abundant supply from Hong Kong and other overseas sources for bringing down prices.
In Beijing's Zhongguancun district, a 16GB iPhone 6 sold for between 6,000 yuan (HK$7,570) and 6,500 yuan yesterday, while the bigger iPhone 6 Plus model was selling for around 9,000 yuan, according to vendors.
The iPhone models hit shop shelves in Hong Kong last week but a date is still to be set for sales on the mainland.
A worker at a shop in Zhongguancun said her store bought more than 100 iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus models from Hong Kong, only to lose thousands of yuan on the deal.
"In the [Zhongguancun] market, if you have stocked the [iPhone 6], you are losing money," she told the .
"The prices are dropping way too fast. Some sellers lost money while their phones were on the plane [to Beijing]."
She said the price of an iPhone 6 Plus fell 2,000 yuan on Saturday.
The grey market price for a 16GB iPhone 6 also dropped from more than 8,000 yuan on Monday to over 7,000 yuan on Tuesday, and to above 6,000 yuan on Wednesday, she said. The 16GB version is retailing for HK$5,588 in Hong Kong through the Apple store.
But another Beijing vendor said there were also scalpers who had made big money from reselling iPhone 6 models.
"Some of the ones who sold their goods quickly earned more than a million yuan," the vendor said.
Another vendor said: "These days, making or losing money all depends on the time [of the handsets' arrival]. [We are] racing against time."
Sellers said that supplies of the iPhone 6 were much greater than releases in previous years, pushing the price down.
In Shenzhen, vendors at the Huaqiangbei commercial area said an influx of individual sellers from Hong Kong exacerbated the price drop.
"Many mainland speculators at Huaqiangbei bought up large stocks of the phones at high prices on Friday and Saturday from Hong Kong. We were all shocked … on Sunday night when we saw a number of Hong Kong people come to sell the phones in the streets in front of our shops," said Chen Chouquan, a trader in Nokia and Apple products at Manha Digital City.
"We all lost big money because of these Hong Kong people. Many of them came on their own with only one or two phones and hawked them on the street. The prices they asked are more competitive than most shops here, as our costs are higher."
Chen said many phones were being smuggled from other offshore markets as well, which had also driven the grey market prices down.
The price of a 64GB iPhone 6 in Huaqiangbei was close to 10,000 yuan on Saturday but dropped to 7,000 on Sunday and 6,600 yuan on Tuesday at the shops there.
Chen said the grey market prices of the iPhone 6 would continue to drop if more customers in the delta and Hong Kong residents decided to trade with each other on the street and not go through agents.
