“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.
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