With iPhone 4S Totally Out of Stock in China, Gray Market Price Jumps

The iPhone 4S is now totally out of stock online

It’s hard to imagine how Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) launch of the iPhone 4S could have gone any worse here in China. First, riots at a Beijing Apple store forced Apple to suspend 4S sales there early in the morning on Friday, the device’s first official day of availability in the country. Bitter scalpers then defaced the walls of that store with eggs, leading Apple to suspend sales of the 4S in Apple stores nationwide.

Of course, the device had been available from Apple’s online store, but no longer. Currently, the Apple China store displays the message “temporarily out of stock” for every single iPhone 4S model. Just a couple days after its official launch, the iPhone 4S is officially unavailable in China. Again.

This is, of course, great news for the aforementioned bitter, egg-throwing scalpers — at least the ones who, at some point, came to their senses and ran across town to pick up a 4S at the Xidan Apple store before Apple halted sales there too. The shortage of official phones has driven up the price of gray market phones, which are now between 500 and 1500 RMB ($78-$235) more expensive than the real thing. That means that even the 16 GB model now costs around $1000 without any kind of contract on the gray market.

Of course that, in turn, will probably inspire even more scalpers to line up the next time Apple launches a product here. Hooray.

[via Sina Tech]