China waits for Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) longer than U.S and Europe

Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone6 and 6 plus have been released a while ago in September and people have pre ordered the devices even before their launch. In China, the official start date for pre-ordering was set on Friday, 10^th October. This was actually, a day before in the U.S due to the time difference between the two countries. The Chinese customers were quite enthusiastic about the new devices; hence over 10 million reservations for the new iPhones were placed.

A website called J.D.com was monitoring the customers who placed orders on 3 wireless Chinese carriers along with some other distributer. These reservation requests started coming in about a week ago. The first results for these observations came in early October and according to these results, the reservations made for iPhone6 and 6 plus were just under 3 million, and there were approximately another 1 million that went unmonitored.

On 4^th October, the reservations in China took a giant leap. J.P.com observed 4 million iPhone 6s and 6 plus orders being placed which took the reservation total to 6.8 million. Previously the total number of reservation was 2.8 million. On Thursday Pacific Time the reservation total in China was 8.6 million.

The number of orders placed for iPhone 6 was almost equal to the orders placed for iPhone 6 plus during the six day observation. To be precise, the reservation percentage for iPhone 6 was 49% and 51% for the 6 plus version. It is too soon to confirm which iPhone is more popular. There has been a shortage of iPhone 6 plus due to humongous amounts of customer orders, and until Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) can catch up to the demand of iPhone 6 plus, it is difficult to say which one is more popular amongst the customers.

iPhone 6 lead times in China:

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) promises that on October 17^th, 8 out of 9 iPhone 6 models will be made available. The tech giant will make the phones available with the Silver 64GB feature at the lead-time of 1-2 weeks.

Similarly, for iPhone 6 plus, 5 out of 9 are expected to be available on the same day. All three colors will be made available with 64GB models at 2-3 weeks and the space gray 128GB model at 1-2 weeks. According to this observation it is evident that the 64GB models are more in demand and this will benefit Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) net cost price of iPhone.

Ever since the first weekend, the new iPhones were made available in U.S on Friday and the lead-time for iPhone 6 as well as iPhone 6 plus has remained the same. The lead-time for iPhone 6 has been 7-10 business days and for iPhone 6 plus, it has been 3-4 weeks.

The lead-times in China can decrease as well. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) might be waiting to observe the market in China and analyse the interest before decreasing the delays in the delivery of devices. The lead-times in Europe and Australia are almost same as the lead-times in U.S.