[lcw]

The manufacturers have contractual agreements with certain carriers in specific regions and get reduced rates because of the purchase power of those markets. It's not ethical in my opinion especially if you want to have a lasting relationship with said manufactures, which we did, to purchase large amounts of those phones and then sell them to US carriers by changing carrier configuration. At the time we were receiving pre released flagship phones to test with. I see people arguing that it's a supply and demand problem and there is nothing wrong with it, but the reality is more like there is demand there, but at the time carries say in South America could make a quick Million USD off just dumping the phones to the US which leaves the people of that region unable to purchase flagship phones at reduced rates. I'm not sure if the economics are the same now, but that was my understanding at the time and I felt like it wasn't and ethical path forward.

[_3u10]

Have you been to South America? Flagship phones don’t cost less here.

Paraguay is about 20% more, Argentina 100 to 200%, and Brazil 30 to 40% more.

Anything that is high end costs much more here due to a combination of tarrifs, reduced volume and the people who are wealthy not caring.

Read up on Ciduad Del Este, it’s basically the electronics hub for the southern cone where electronics are smuggled into Brazil and Argentina. Beef and eggs from Argentina get smuggled into Brazil and PY.

Anything that you were doing pales in comparison to what everyone here is doing.

[lcw]

Thanks for sharing I'm definitely going to read into it a bit, and I'll be the first to admit I don't know much about South American economics nor have I spent a lot of time there.I definitely haven't bought anything expensive there. As I said in a previous comments this was sometime ago, but I would say that if a bunch of carriers were selling their allotment of phones to US markets it could lead to the scenarios that you are depicting. If it's easier to offload to the US market expensive phones than reasonably there would have to be a big incentive to keep them in market which would inflate costs to be higher than US markets. I can't speak to the tariff issues though that could hurt my argument. It may be a lesser evil at the end of the day who is it for me to say. I just didn't feel right about it.

[_3u10]

Yeah the cell phone world is a little dodgy at times.

[barnabee]

It’s unethical to stand by and allow a manufacturer this kind of control over their customers either by legal or technological means.

It should be illegal to impose such terms on anyone who purchases anything from you.

Freeing those phones was a virtuous act, even if done for self interested reasons.

[lcw]

I think you are looking at this from the consumer side, and I completely agree with you. Consumers are probably none the wiser on the original intended region of their phone and should not be penalized.

I'm talking from a corporation/carrier side that let this happen to consumers. If you sign to terms of a contract that gives you special access to phones to sell in your region and then you just go and break that contract that doesn't seem right to me. To be clear I don't think downstream consumers did something wrong.