China’s Telecom Association Claims Meizu M9 Launch Day Queues Were Staged

January 1st saw the of the most anticipated Chinese since the M8! The M9! The M9 had people queueing outside local dealers from as early as 6am in the morning on freezing January mornings. The local and international press posted images of hundreds of fans queueing for a peek at Jack Wong’s latest Android . We experienced first hand the queues and excitement at the store in Qingdao, but was all the fuss and excitement nothing more than clever marketing?

More after the jump! Days after the extremely successful of the M9 the Secretary General of the Chinese Telecom Industry Association, Li Yi wrote on his Weibo micro blog asking his ‘dear friends’ in the media to stop reporting on the huge of customers waiting for the M9. He went on to say the were staged and were in fact actors hired by to hype up the . Li, claimed that these tactics were typical of and even went on to congratulate Wong’s ‘staged’ as not only being successful but also very cheap estimating the whole M9 couldn’t have cost more than 300,000 Yuan ($45,000).

In typical fashion Meizu didn’t take the claims lying down, with Hailiang Hua Meizu’s Sales Director calling the claims ‘ignorant and a joke”.
As every CEO Jack Wong was even more vocal and said that “big mouth” Li Yu must be responsible for his words, even threatening to take him to court!

Whether the lines in the larger cities were staged we don’t know, but from what we saw in Qingdao we’re pretty sure we meant genuine Meizu fans excitedly waiting to see the latest Meizu handset.

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Source: techSina