Only three days after the releasing of new iphones, Apply announced that it has sold a record-breaking nine million new iPhone, which is the best phone launch in the history.

The official price of iphone 5s is identical to the precious iphone 5, however, the golden iphone 5s’s price went surprisingly high in the grey market in China, US$1,634, which is almost the doubling price of the official price. This happened not only in mainland china, but also in the special region, HongKong. Hundred and thousands scalpers waited outside the Apple store on the launch date of new iphones. Those people who successfully bought gold-colored iPhone 5s were able to resell at a double price immediately. While the golden 5S ordering has been out-of-stock until mid-october only three days after its releasing,  the 5Cs are available to buy in 24hours.

Due to the number of population and consuming ability, Apple has slowly developed a value proposition mainly targeting the chinese market in these several years. Although there are lots of other brands of smart phones which have the similar function to iPhone, there isn’t any gold-color ones so far, chinese people’s enthusiasm towards the color gold make iphone 5s benefits from the market. A new economic bubble (price bubble) formed at the same time. With the similar function and material used for iphone 5 and 5s, 5s is trade in high price which is considerably at variance with intrinsic values.

The situation appears to be very similar to the release of a digital camera of Casio several years before. When the Casio TR-150 was released in 2012, it only sale for 300 dollars, however, the price has now reached 1000 dollars, the price is far higher than it actually worth and the asset price bubble make a lot of people not able to afford for it.

Sources:

http://www.apple.com/ca/pr/library/2013/09/23First-Weekend-iPhone-Sales-Top-Nine-Million-Sets-New-Record.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_bubble

http://www.zdnet.com/gold-iphone-5s-the-only-spark-among-chinese-consumers-7000020980/