With Christmas less than 48 hours away, the super rich are seeking gifts for their loved ones, and one of the top gifts in the UAE is an iPhone 7 encased in solid gold, encrusted with diamonds and bearing the face of Donald Trump, the US president elect.
According to CNNMoney, the phone is priced around $151,000, which translates to N74.7 million at N495/$ or N46 million at the official rate of N305 per dollar.
An iPhone 7 in Nigeria is about N400,000 to N520,000 in Nigeria, depending on the specifications.
The gift is said to be just one example of the mind-blowing bling sold by Goldgenie, a store in the United Arab Emirates where the super rich do their shopping.
“There are very wealthy, high-net-worth individuals all over the world and sometimes its very difficult to buy gifts for them because they have everything,” said Frank Fernando, Goldgenie’s managing director.
Report from TheCable stated that all the opulent objects on sale at his store in Sharjah, a city near Dubai, are either solid gold, gold plated or diamond encrusted. But the idea for the golden Trump iPhone came from a customer only recently.
A Chinese woman walked into the store last month and requested that Goldgenie put together the glitzy device emblazoned with the president-elect’s features, Fernando told CNNMoney, declining to identify the woman by name.
He said he believes her family wants to give it to the US president-elect after his inauguration next month.
Since selling that first Trump iPhone, Goldgenie says it has received a further nine orders for gold-plated ones bearing his face.
Goldgenie started out in London back in 1989. The company’s business concept was simple: gold plate virtually any item its customers wanted.
Fernando says his staff members will even take their special gold-plating machine to wealthy individuals’ homes in order to cover their entire bathrooms in the precious metal.
“We have many visits from the royal families. They visit us in London and they don’t just buy one phone. They buy five, ten phones to give as gifts,” Fernando adds.
“We needed to come here to show ourselves to all the people in the Arab states.”
Posted by Juliet Ekwebelam
