China Telecom Expected to Launch iPhone 5 in October

According to the information from China Telecom, China Telecom is starting to prepare for the sales of the iPhone 5 and conduct staff training. It will accept orders for the iPhone 5 earliest at the late September, and China Telecom will begin to sell it in October. It is revealed that the difference between Telecom version iPhone 5 and iPhone 4 is the machine-card separation. A company insider said that iPhone 5 should begin to accept order in the mid September, but it was put off.

Additionally, on the basis of some reports, a LED screen at the a branch of China Telecom, Chang’an Road, Suzhou, had already posted advertisement of the forthcoming debut of the iPhone 5 and welcome customers to order it.

An authorized distributor of Apple products, Tiannuo said that though it has not information of Apple launch time for  iPhone 5, it has already started to accept advance bookings for it, and the booking fees were 2,000 yuan.

According to the information of China Telecom insider, after reference of iPhone 4 subsidies of China Unicom, China Telecom prepares to spend 1.5 billion yuan for the marketing of the iPhone 5 under a plan named as “Dragon Plan”. Statistics show that in the half year of 2011, China Telecom has already owned 108 million subscribers, which has surpassed American Verizon Wireless and become the world’s largest CDMA operator. At present, China Telecom has high-end users between 13 million and 15 million, with potential to generate revenue of $8-9 billion.

 Since the beginning of this year, China Telecom offers written code service (known as burning crack number) for parallel CDMA version of iPhone 4.

Some analysts predict that at the end of 2011, China Telecom may sell 1.06 million iPhones in total. Meanwhile, according to Wang Xiaochu, company chairman, this company will increase subsidies for its mobile customers with the introduction of iPhone 5.

Since the iPhone 5 is expected to launch soon, iPhone 4’s selling price fell slightly and in Guangzhou, it is about 4,280 yuan now.