Apple has suspended retail sales of its iPhone 4S in Beijing and Shanghai after outraged Chinese shoppers pelted its flagship Beijing store in Sanlitun with eggs following a botched product launch event.
A restless crowd was told that the store would not be opening and they would be unable to purchase the product they had all been queuing for hours in sub-zero temperatures for.
As a result of the ensuing melee, police had to be brought in to manage the disgruntled, unruly crowd.
Trouble broke out and eggs began to fly in the early hours of this morning after an Apple official with a bullhorn informed the already restless, freezing mass that the phones would not go on sale as planned, and that they should all go home.
“We’re suffering from cold and hunger,” one furious young man in his 20s told Reuters Television. “They said they’re not going to sell to us. Why? Why?”
Police were forced to drag some of the crowd away, while other threw eggs at the store and engaged in a protracted pushing battle with police and security staff. The situation was brought under control by mid-morning and the immediate area sealed off with police tape, leaving passing office workers able to snap images of the eggy storefront.
Following the botched launch Apple has said that it will halt sales of the device in China, although the phones can still be purchased online and from China Unicom. The demand for smartphones among Chinese consumers is growing rapidly, and Gartner estimates that Apple represents over 10% of the market.
“The demand for iPhone 4S has been incredible, and our stores in China have already sold out,” said an Apple spokeswoman.
“Unfortunately we were unable to open our store at Sanlitun due to the large crowd, and to ensure the safety of our customers and employees, iPhones will not be available in our retail stores in Beijing and Shanghai for the time being.”
This isn’t the first time violence has erupted at an Apple launch in the country. In 2011, the same store in Sanlitun, Beijing, saw one man injured and a glass window smashed after a fight broke out among shoppers queuing for an iPad 2.
Some of the secret behind Apple’s success comes from the firm’s skill at creating buzz around its new product launches. In China, new devices are made available significantly later than in the US, increasing the hype around a launch.
However, many commentators have been quick to attribute today’s unrest, not to regular law-abiding consumers, simply driven insane by hypothermia, hunger and mob mentality, but to a shady group of black market dealers known as scalpers, and the hundreds of people they paid to queue up for them.
Reports suggest that groups of identically clad scalpers had joined the queue with the intention of buying stacks of new iPhones to sell on at a mark-up. Chinese state run news service Yinhua estimates that up 1000 scalpers were among this morning’s crowd.
