“Apple Inc., hoping to revitalize sales in China, has paired up with the world’s largest financial-technology company to give iPhone buyers an affordable purchase option: up to two years of interest-free financing,” Stella Yifan Xie reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“Apple and Alipay, a popular Chinese mobile-payments network owned by Jack Ma’s Ant Financial Services Group, this week informed customers that they could borrow money at no cost to buy products on Apple’s online store and pay for the devices in monthly installments over 24 months,” Xie reports. “The minimum purchase to qualify for the interest-free financing is 4,000 yuan ($595). On Apple’s China website, the cost of an iPhone 8 starts at 5,099 yuan ($758) while the iPhone XR, a new handset released last fall that the company hoped would sell well in China, has a starting price of 6,499 yuan ($967).”
“The new financing offer from Ant’s Huabei service, which provides lines of credit to tens of millions of individuals who use the Alipay platform, will sharply lower the monthly sums that people have to pay for new iPhones,” Xie reports. “Huabei, which means ‘just spend’ in Chinese, on Wednesday told customers that it could temporarily increase their credit limits to enable them to purchase Apple products.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: You know you want a new iPhone, so go get a new iPhone!
Maybe making an iPhone SE 2 could help sales Tim. And price it between 449 and 549. Among the potential customers for that model there are many people in countries where 1000 dollars for a phone is too much or for the people not interested in bigger sizes. That upgraded SE would be more interesting option than an iPhone 7 that costs between 449 and 549 and could have the same screen size.
AliEexpress offers the whole gamut of old and new iPhones here:
https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=SB_20190221204138&SearchText=iPhone
kinda strange someone would down vote a purely informational post. So i five starred it to even it out.
I want to encourage factual posts, even pro or con on issues discussed in articles, or posts that add information.
Yeah. It’s silly.