Apple fans travel the globe for new iPhone

Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, has his photograph taken with customers at the Apple Store during the launch and sale of the new iPhone 6 on Friday in Palo Alto, California. Photo: AP

Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, has his photograph taken with customers at the Apple Store during the launch and sale of the new iPhone 6 on Friday in Palo Alto, California. Photo: AP

Published Sep 22, 2014

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Tim Higgins, Doni Bloomfield and Cornelius Rahn San Francisco

GOING on an iVacation?

The long lines of people eager to get their hands on Apple’s latest iPhones took on a new flavour this year, as queues swelled with tourists joining in the revelry on Friday to buy handsets that were not yet available back home.

Russians queueing in Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm sang “Katyusha” and drank vodka, while Brazilians travelled halfway across the world to Sydney to pick up the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus models. Mandarin, Vietnamese and Spanish were being spoken outside San Francisco’s Apple Store.

“We decided to line up because it’s cheaper here,” said Eva Trancoso, who was in Tokyo waiting with two other Dutch tourists at a shop in Shibuya. “And it won’t be available in Holland” for a while, she said.

The globetrotting shoppers lining up on the first day of iPhone sales in Australia, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Germany, France, UK, Canada, Puerto Rico and the US were there because they would not be able to buy the new bigger-screen smartphones until Friday at the earliest in the next batch of countries.

While the new iPhones make ideal travel gifts, they are also an attractive investment opportunity for resellers planning to sell them at a premium in their home countries.

“I came here for tourism, and my wife and friends asked me to bring them the new iPhone,” Yury Shchepetkov, a power engineer from Moscow, said while waiting in Berlin.

“I had no idea I would be stuck in line for two nights without a sleeping bag.”

US investment bank Piper Jaffray said the line outside Apple’s Fifth Avenue store in New York was 33 percent longer than for last year’s debut of the iPhone 5s and 5c.

“There was an even more significant influence of international buyers, even more than last year,” Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, wrote in a note to investors.

Apple has not said when China and Brazil would get the new iPhones.

They are not on the list of countries that will get the phones in the next wave, which includes Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Isle of Man, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

The new iPhones are targeted to compete directly with bigger-screen smartphones popular with consumers in Asia. Those phones typically run on Android and are made by Samsung Electronics and Lenovo Group, among others.

“It’s a big status symbol everywhere,” Tim Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies, said of the new iPhones and the global interest.

Carolyn Wu, a Beijing-based spokeswoman for Apple, did not respond to a request for comment about when the phones would reach Brazil and China. – Bloomberg

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