China’s Hasee uses iPhone 6 launch to promote itself by breaking iPhones

The iPhone 6 launched in China today, and as usual there were crowds at Apple Stores across the Middle Kingdom. In fact, these launch events have become big enough that apparently other tech companies are now using them for viral marketing.

Chinese tech company Hasee, which makes PCs and smartphones, dispatched people wearing yellow “Hasee” shirts and carrying big yellow signs to Apple stores in Beijing, Kunming, Chengdu, Dongguan, Guangzhou, Shijiazhuang, Hangzhou, Xiamen, Nanning, Xi’an, Shanghai, Nanchang, Shenzhen, Hefei, Zhengzhou, and Guiyang. The signs read “straight men don’t bend” – a reference to the reports of the new iPhones bending in people’s pockets – and at at least some of the stores, an additional Hasee rep appeared to bend and then snap an iPhone 6 in half. For example, the video below was taken in Shenzhen:

(If you’re in China, you can click here to watch the original video directly on Youku).

On its Weibo account, the Chinese company said:

We respect our great opponent [Apple], but even more than that we believe that only phones that don’t bend in half are good phones.

Hasee is currently marketing a smartphone of its own, the Shenzhou X55, that it claims can withstand 1,000 pounds of pressure.

It’s hard to know whether to praise or condemn Hasee for this approach. On the one hand, it’s impressive that the company found a way to take advantage of the Apple hype and get noticed in a big way. On the other hand, the weirdly-homophobic-sounding signs (“straight men” means the same thing in Chinese that it does in English) are off-putting, and the approach feels a bit desperate coming from a tech company that isn’t one of the country’s top domestic players.