05-10-2012, 08:01 PM
Grieve Wrote:Last week a couple of people from my Shanghai team were over to visit. What do you think their priorities were outside of work hours? Exploring? Visit the tourist traps? A few beers? Nope...their number one priority was for me to take them to the local Apple store, where they loaded up on iPhones and iPads to take back for family and coworkers in China (yeah, they are cheaper here than in the place they are made - go figure).
That cheaper here part is going to be a bottleneck to chinas growth, especially if they continue to not cater to the lower end. The Nouveau Riche in Shanghai love their expensive toys (these are the people that support a mall that is entirely higher end designer shit - Gucci, Prada, Hermes - in a city where you can get the exact same articles with one miniscule different stitch down the road on chi pu lu...), but the average Chinese in the cities that aren't shanghai are going to have a hard time jumping on that bandwagon when you can get so many knockoffs or other brands much cheaper. I've never seen so many bootleg ghetto tablets as I did last time I visited the folks.
Also, the bigger a player apple becomes in China the more fun its going to have dealing with the government. Google can testify to how fun that is.