China Unicom means business, buys 5 million iPhones from Apple

By on Aug 13, 2009 at 5:23 PM
General August 13, 2009

After what can only be described as a long and grueling courting period, Apple and China Unicom finally managed to strike a deal recently. For those who missed the news, the Chinese carrier has convinced Apple to issue a tweaked version of its popular handset with Wi-Fi disabled. How did China Unicom manage to convince Apple to build a special iPhone just for China? Well, the same way any company convinces Apple to do anything — a whole lot of cash. The International Business Times is reporting that China Unicom has purchased a whopping 5 million iPhone 3GS units in a preliminary order as the carrier prepares to launch the device next month. The order, totaling Â¥10 billion ($1.46 billion USD), will put China Unicom’s launch inventory at nearly the same number of handsets Apple sold worldwide last quarter. In other words, the carrier is anticipating huge sales come September and wants to ensure its inventory is up to the task. According to China Unicom’s GM of Customer Development Yu Zaonan, Apple’s handset will be priced at Â¥2,400 ($352 USD) for the 16GB model and Â¥4,800 ($704 USD) for the 32GB model.

[Via AppleInsider]

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  • tavella

    I stated where I believed things were software opposed to hardware. Like I said, my opinions and experiences…. Not too positive. You fan boys are a bit much and take anything you believe is negative and go o the defense. So glad people are allow to give their opinions. Enjoy your $50/mo data and text messaging plan that offers practically nothing. I’ll be damned they day I pay $99/yr for push email in addition to the $30/mo when it came with my BB plan.

    I did at least give the phone a try unlike the bashers you’re trying to associate me with.

    @JohnBo

    I jailbroke this the day purpler1n came out and re did it when the dev team released their form of the jailbreak. I know this phone very well by now and how to work around most of the functionality issues that sould have been enabled or working properly before the phone was released. Just because I came from a Blackberry doesn’t mean I don’t know or care to take the time to learn about this device. Go back and reread my post. I know the difference between a “unix” based and java based os. It’s just sad the unix based os isn’t better on memory management.

  • Dtest54

    and there’s tavella’s bias.

    anyways – sucks that they had to disable wifi but when dealing with monopolies you have to meet their demands in order to do business.

    AAPL = BUY

  • Ron

    What hardware issues are those?

  • tav luvr

    “I jailbroke this the day purpler1n came out and re did it when the dev team released their form of the jailbreak.”

    @ tavella: wow, you are so supercool! I don’t think any phone could live up to your level of smarts! You are my hero!!!

  • Keith

    Saying that the iPhone is awesome you just need to jailbreak it to fix the problems is the worst arguement ever for why the iPhone is good. You shouldn’t have to hack a phone to make it good.

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