“Chinese police have arrested five members of an organized gang that was making and selling fake iPhones,” Kelly Hodgkins reports for TUAW.
“The members would buy components, some of them genuine, on the black market and assemble the phones in rented Shanghai apartments,” Hodgkins reports. “The police seized about 200 iPhones in the raid. Each iPhone had an estimated build cost of 2,000 yuan (US$313 as of this writing) and sold for almost twice that on the black market.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
So Apple? When are you going to get the H E L L out of fracking China?
Uhm, why? It won’t stop the counterfeiters or clone makers or those who buy components to make their own iPhones, illegally. Remember the NYC high school kid selling white iPhone kits? Lots of people supported him, and used the opportunity to bash Apple for picking on some enterprising high school kid. Of course, he was buying parts shipped out of the back door at Foxconn, hardly much different than what these people were doing.
There’s no cogent business reason for Apple to exit China. Fully 26% of Apple’s revenues from the last quarter came from China and Asian operations excluding Japan. Apple does a tremendous amount of business in Asia. It is reckoned that Asia will contribute a larger slice of Apple revenues from Q1 2012 onwards than EMEA (Europe & the Middle East). You don’t ignore a market of that size based on a couple of counterfeiters.
There’s probably a thousand more of these shops in China!
Who knew that Samsung was building phones in Shanghai apartments!
Now we know where Samsung gets its phones 🙂
It’s probably why even broken iPhones on eBay get a decent selling price. Someone in the U.S. buys them up and sends them (in bulk) to the “gang” in China. In China, the broken iPhones are disassembled, and the working parts (along with cheap new parts like batteries and casing) are assembled into working iPhones. Then, they are resold
Meanwhile, in the US, the pundits all say that if Apple can’t make more iPhones, the Chinese will turn to Android.