“Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Less than a week after an American blogger sparked a media and internet frenzy with her post about fake Apple stores in Kunming, a small city in southwest China, authorities there have moved to close down two of the copycat shops,” Pan Kwan Yuk writes for The Financial Times.”Victory for Apple? Depends on how you look at it.”
“To begin with, just two out of five fake stores were ordered to close, and not because of piracy or copyright concerns but because they did not have an official business permit. So so much for China cracking down on copyright infringement,” Yuk writes. “Second, as outrageous as these self-branded “Apple Stores” are, maybe they have their upside: you could argue they were a great free study of the local market for Steve Jobs.”
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Yuk writes, “What the fake stores have shown is that even in second-tier cities like Kunming, five Apple stores – three of them within a 10-minute walk of each other – can and do thrive.”
Read more in the full article here.
Related articles:
Chinese authorities order two fake Apple Retail Stores to close – July 25, 2011
Customers angry, staff defiant at China’s fake Apple Store – July 22, 2011
Multiple fake ‘Apple Stores’ in China even fake out employees – July 20, 2011
Microsoft retail fiasco to remodel? Apple files trademark for distinctive retail store layout – May 19, 2010
Ummmm……I don’t think so……yawn.
What it shows is that the Apple Store design will attract customers if great products and great service are offered.
@kenc
True, but the important point is the products. Microsoft ripped off the Apple store designs for the MS stores, but they are still trying to sell s**t, so the MS stores are empty, even though they are as nice as the Apple stores.
They should call them MS Crickets Stores, as that’s the only sound they make. Humanity is the scarcest commodity at Microsoft Stores. Crap is in abundant supply.
The problem there is that Microsoft’s leaders are completely deluded and believe “Microsoft” is positive branding. In the real world, seeing something called the “Microsoft Store” makes customers want to intentionally avoid it (unless they are giving away free concert tickets or something).
It’s the same with Windows Phone 7. Seeing “Windows” in the name will make a lot of potential customers avoid it. Microsoft is deluded and thinks “Windows” is positive branding.
This goes even farther. For some reason, both the Ford Motor Company and Microsoft think that “Sync, powered by Microsoft” is some sort of sales incentive. To me, and maybe many others, this is just another reason to pull into the local Chevy dealer instead… (I got 90 days of free OnStar when I bought a used Malibu last month)
Aldo Ford quality dropped way down lately. They noted the cause was problem with crashing, sluggish performance and failure of “Sync” to be stable.
Again, Microsoft has a negative effect or the costly Microsoft Tax added to any product Microsoft lays hands on.
Microsoft has the lead touch!
Uhm, open more stores quicker?
It shows there may be no exact word for “original” in any Chinese dialect.
@Thelonious
original and funny!
I read some of the stores had a big Apple logo on the front of the store. Were the stores selling legitimate Apple products with legitimate Apple Chinese warranties?
Even if they were, I can still see the abuse of other copycat stores using the bait and switch tactics to get customers into the stores only to try talk them into a competitors product. Circuit City was famous for that.
High protein powdered milk, anyone? 🙁
These stores were legitimate resellers of Apple products. Where they went to far was aping Apple’s trade dress for the retail stores.
Even if they were selling legitimate products actually produced and manufactured by Apple, I’d have a hard time believing it from a store that tried to play itself off as an authentic Apple Store to the point employees believing they were employed by Apple.
What I would like to know is, where were all these fake stores getting product to sell? Was Apple or their manufacturers secretly supplying them with computers, iphone, etc.? The stores had/have lots of inventory for quite willing customers to buy.
One minute every Tom Dick and Harry is telling Apple that its retail stores are a expensive two year mistake, and then the next minute they are saying the stores are too scarce. Even worse, that Apple is INTENSIONALLY making them scarce to garner some mythical “hard to get” sentiment. As if any company could just make their products scarce and then just sit and reap the “hard to get” harvest.
What a laughing stock these so called analysts and experts and harvard business profs are.
BREAKING NEWS: Investigators have discovered that all of China was stolen and replaced recently with a counterfeit version.
… and the citizens think they’re really Chinese.
Reading other articles it is apparent that the products being sold, at least in the store widely reported on, were actual Apple products that they bought legitimately on the open market. They were one of the two stores closed for lack of a business permit. If all the other stores were selling real Apple products, I wouldn’t be surprised.
What is at issue here is not the products themselves but the fact that they copied the store so perfectly. I expect that Apple may have the look of the stores trademarked in the US, maybe even in Canada and the other countries they are in. It may not be possible to trademark that in China. Remember they are new to capitalism.
If the products are legitimate, who really cares, except that the stores cannot offer the type of customer support we have grown used to. If they are legit Aoole products they can still register them and get their one year’s Apple care and service.
What a moron! Yeh, Apple REALLY needed this information to know an Apple store might do OK in a city of — SIX MILLION PEOPLE!
Yes, but a “second-tier” city of six million people.
Just proves how much up-side there is to AAPL.
“What Steve Jobs can learn from China’s fake Apple stores” – that he doesn’t need the Financial Times to tell him the bleedin’ obvious.
Apple should have let this run a bit longer. Crack the Chinese market? Hell let the Chinese do it for you. For free. Once the products are entrenched (as well as they can) swoop in and just take over and ‘officialise’ the already existing stores.
…. It shows that China continues to be a criminal state.
And of course the USA loves supporting criminal states with their dollars. (0_o)
Dear Apple: Please get your manufacturing the HELL out of China.