The sales heat of Meizu M9 is comparable to that of iPhone4

On January 1, 2011 Beijing time, at the beginning of the new year, the Meizu M9 was finally officially launched for sale in five major cities in China. Reporters from Tencent Digital also witnessed the entire first-sale process at Xidan Joy City in Beijing.

The Meizu M9 went on sale simultaneously in five locations: Beijing, Shanghai, Zhuhai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. In Beijing, there were two sales locations - one at the fifth floor mobile phone plaza in Xidan Joy City and another at SOHO Sanlitun. These are located in the same place as Apple's two Apple Stores, which may or may not be a coincidence. The first sale event in Beijing was scheduled to start at 9:30 am, but people had already started queuing up at the entrance of Joy City at 5 o'clock in the morning. According to on-site estimates, by 9 o'clock, the number of people queuing up at the entrance of Joy City exceeded 500. Afterwards, Meizu staff mentioned that this was "beyond their expectations."

Since the launch of the Meizu M9 used an advance reservation system with on-site machine pickup, all consumers who participated in the reservation activity received a logo sticker marked "Meizu Beijing Station," which was the sole proof of purchase. However, more people in the queue did not participate in the reservation beforehand but still came to Joy City with great enthusiasm for the M9, hoping to buy a phone.

Unlike Apple, the sales of Meizu M9 at Joy City in Beijing were not handled by Meizu itself, but by a distributor called "Tianbosichuang." Mr. Liu Wei, the general manager of Tianbosichuang, revealed to reporters that they received nearly 1,000 units of the Meizu M9 for the Beijing first sale. Although the inventory was sufficient, he still didn't expect such a large number of buyers to show up.

At 9:30, Joy City officially opened for business, and a large number of buyers surged into the front of the fifth-floor Meizu specialty store. Among them was even a grandmother over seventy years old buying an M9 for her granddaughter. Due to insufficient experience in organizing the first sale, the large number of buyers once caused extreme chaos on site. This situation continued until around 10:30 when it was controlled by additional security guards and police. During more than an hour of sales, the Meizu specialty store only managed to call out up to number 86, showing how difficult it was to control the scene and how the sales process was disrupted.

Throughout the morning, the Meizu specialty store distributed 400 pre-sale numbers, and only with these pre-sale numbers could one buy the phone. At that time, more than half of the people on site hadn't received a number and were anxiously waiting. By 11:30 am when the reporter left the scene, the pre-sale work of the Meizu M9 was finally able to proceed normally under the maintenance of more than a dozen security personnel, but this was already two hours after the official start of sales.

It is reported that apart from the EP-20 model headphones included with the pre-order (the Meizu M9 packaging does not come with headphones), each consumer who bought the M9 on site also received a small gift from Meizu - a Meizu badge. Regarding pricing, the first batch of Meizu M9s available were all 8GB versions, priced at 2499 yuan. As per the Meizu staff, the factory had not yet shipped the 16GB version, so those wanting to choose the 16GB version would have to wait a bit longer.