iPhone 4S Arrives in Hong Kong & South Korea on November 11
Apple® today announced that iPhone® 4S, the most amazing iPhone yet, will be available in Hong Kong, South Korea and 13 additional countries on Friday, November 11. Customers will be able to pre-order iPhone 4S beginning on Friday, November 4.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third wave of the iPhone 4S rollout in under a month. After Apple opened pre-orders for the October 14 launch and then sold out its initial pre-order inventory within a day, the company pushed into 22 additional countries on October 29 — where online orders slipped to 1-2 week shipping estimates, a signal that demand was outrunning supply in every market it entered.
The November 11 date adds Hong Kong, South Korea and 13 more countries to that stretched rollout, with pre-orders opening November 4 — the same pre-order-first cadence Apple used in the US. The timing matters commercially: analysts already project the iPhone at more than half of Q4 smartphone sales across the top-three US carriers, so each new wave extends that holiday-quarter momentum into fresh markets.
First-order effects
- Customers in Hong Kong and South Korea get their first chance to buy the 4S on November 4 via pre-order, a week before in-store availability — the same sequence that produced a sellout in the US launch window.
- Apple's supply chain now has to split constrained 4S inventory across roughly 40+ markets simultaneously, with the existing 1-2 week online shipping backlog from the October 29 wave still unfilled.
Second-order effects
- Carriers in the newly added markets gain or lose a holiday-quarter differentiator based on 4S allocation — the phone's projected majority share of Q4 smartphone sales makes stock depth a direct competitive weapon against rivals carrying other handsets.
- Persistent backlogs push secondary-market pricing above retail in supply-starved countries, a dynamic that tends to intensify rather than ease as each new wave adds demand faster than production adds units.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Apple's staged country-by-country launches function as a rolling demand-management system — each wave refreshes scarcity headlines and lets the company stretch a single product cycle across an entire quarter of global news cycles.
- For markets like South Korea with strong domestic handset industries, sustained iPhone supply constraints make carrier lineups — who has the iPhone, and how much of it — a structural axis of competition rather than a one-launch event.
The trend: Smartphone flagships are shifting from simultaneous global launches to staged regional waves, letting Apple convert manufacturing constraints into a quarter-long sequence of demand events.