China's ZTE Gets a Shot of First Lady Power
日期：2014-04-08 阅读:942次
Peng Liyuan, wife of Chinese President Xi Jinping, has become her country’s premier fashion icon, patriotic consumer and ambassador for China’s often maligned designers and manufacturers, who need every bit of international prestige they can get.
Bloggers and analysts follow her every skirt, shoe and handbag choice with breathless enthusiasm. But her stubborn choice of an Apple iPhone over plentiful but not particularly distinguished Chinese brands had, at least until last weekend, become a sore point with the tech savvy and social media trawling public.
But during a visit to Germany on Saturday, critics were hushed after a photo flashed around the world’s news agencies: Peng, seated next to Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn, photographing a soccer match with what appeared to be a Nubia Mini, the top of the line phone from ZTE, a Shezhen based tech company.
ZTE was ready with a (albeit slightly tentative) press release. “Through rigorous comparison of the appearance of the phone, its is highly likely that the cell phone the wife of the Chairman was using is the Nubia — a high-end ZTE phone.”
We also found out that the Nubia’s flagship Z5 model is ZTE’s “first product introducing SLR (Single Lens Reflex) core functionality to a smartphone” with optical image stabilization technology, and “the world’s first independent white balance function.”
That was good enough for phone afficionados. Soon, sales of the Nubia, which retails for around $300, had jumped on JD.com, the ecommerce website, and ZTE’s shareprice rose 4 percent on Tuesday.
Traffic to ZTE’s website doubled over the weekend according to a spokesman.
This isn’t the first time that the First Lady’s fashion choices have created havoc. During her first state visit to Moscow, she wore a coat from the Chinese designer Exception. The ecommerce website Taobao was jammed with traffic as consumers tried to find out what brand she was wearing, and once that was discovered, the website of Exception crashed due to the traffic load.
In comparison, ZTE seemed almost to be expecting the attention. Almost immediately on the Nubia’s official Weibo social media page, ZTE posted the photo of Peng holding the phone along with the slogan “the Chinese dream starts with Chinese made” a reference to her husband’s political slogan “Chinese dream.”
In addition to the apparent celebrity endorsement, the Nubia phone has other things going for it. Notably an extremely distinctive name, which to a Chinese ear, sounds a bit too much like “Niubi,” which roughly translated means “effing awesome” in Mandarin. Given the company’s killer instinct for self promotion, it’s hard to believe this is an accident.