Shenzhen Clears Smuggled-Chip, Stolen-iPhone Stalls Before APEC

On the fourth floor of the Feiyang Times tower in Shenzhen, the stalls are empty.

The Financial Times, in reporting by William Langley, says renovations over the past two months have cleared out the market floor it has previously identified as "a hub for iPhones stolen in London and New York." Vendors there and in nearby phone markets say they are "no longer allowed to sell iPhones sourced from overseas," pushing trade toward fully legitimate products and leaving many stalls empty.

The cleanup is timed to the APEC summit Shenzhen is about to host. The southern megacity, home to Huawei, Tencent and BYD, has long run a parallel trade in "smuggled computer chips, stolen iPhones, dual-use drones and counterfeit luxury goods." That trade has been visibly paused. Arrests have risen and counterfeit vendors have halted business across commercial districts.

The FT piece runs thin on specifics. No arrest totals, no seized-chip tallies, no named officials. What it documents is the before-and-after at named buildings: the overseas-iPhone resale stopped, the stalls emptied. Whether any of this survives once the delegations fly home is the question the reporting leaves open.

It lands amid a heavy run of China-chip coverage on our tracker, including yesterday's note on Congressional Democrats lining up Nvidia export probes.