China Mobile Grabs Over 100,000 iPhone Preorders in 2 Days

Analysts at Wedge Partners have said that China Mobile has grabbed over 100,000 preorders for the iPhone 5s and 5c during the first two days of availability, AllThingsD is reporting. The world’s largest mobile carrier started taking iPhone preorders through its website and customer service hotline on Christmas Day.

ChinaMobile

While the initial iPhone preorder number is surely quite high, it seems that China Mobile’s rival carriers who have a much smaller subscriber base, managed to receive larger number of preorders when the iPhone 5s and 5c were first launched a few months back. In September, China Unicom racked up about 120,000 preorders and China Telecom about 150,000 for the two models. According to the source, the reason for this is that iPhone 5s and 5c are now two months old, and China Mobile “isn’t doing much” to differentiate them on its network.

According to Wedge, its subsidies are similar to China Telecom’s and slightly higher than China Unicom’s.

“What’s important to remember is these phones launched in September,” Wedge analyst Brian Blair told AllThingsD. “Now here we are several months later and there’s no subsidy being offered that’s so special that the preorders are off the charts. If this had been in September when the phone launched globally, I think the numbers would be a lot higher.”

Now the real question is, what will sales look like when the two iPhone models officially launch on China Mobile on January 17th?

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