iPhone 4S Available At China Telecom As Of March 9th

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China Telecom, China’s third biggest carrier, have recently signed a partnership deal with Apple which allows them to sell the iPhone 4S (the 16GB version) at a price of $62 (389 yuan) on a two year contract starting March 9th. The China Telecom iPhone 4S pre-orders will start on March 2nd.

China is the worlds biggest market for the smartphone manufacturers, with almost 1 billion cell phone users. By signing this contract, the second with a Chinese carrier (the first one was China Unicom), Apple could avoid problems like the ones in January, when because of the high demand they had to stop selling the device as it ran out of stock.

In January 2012, when iPhone 4S was launched on the Chinese market, Apple faced a demand that overpassed even the most optimistic estimations. As a result the iPhone 4S quickly run out of stock and the America-based company announced they are temporary halting the sales.

About 1,000 people waited on January 13th in front of the Apple Store in Sanlitun (Beijing) in order to be among the first to get their hands on the brand new iPhone 4S. After the smartphone quickly ran out of stock, they people waiting in front of the Apple Store started to throw eggs in the windows, attracting the police intervention.

China Unicom was the first carrier to sign an agreement with Apple and sell the iPhone on the Chinese market (starting October 2009) and is the second biggest carrier in China. China Unicom started selling the iPhone 4S in China in January 2012. China Unicom had 43 million 3G users by the end of the last month. In comparison, China Telecom, the third biggest carrier in China, had not less than 38.7 million 3G users at the end of January 2012.

Apple was the fifth mobile phones vendor on the Chinese market in the last quarter of 2011, with about 2.08 million iPhone units sold and a market share of 7.5%, says a Gartner report. Samsung Electronics was the Chinese market leader, holding 24% of the smartphones market pie, followed by Nokia, Huawei and ZTE.

Even though Apple managed to sign partnership deals with China Unicom and China Telecom, the Cupertino-based company haven’t yet reached an agreement with China’s biggest carrier, China Mobile, a company that has over 600 million users. The main reason why Apple and China Mobile doesn’t sign a deal is that the Asian carrier is using TD_SCDMA technology, a standard that for the time being is not supported by the Apple terminals.