India excelled once again for Apple as the company lauded its sales in the “extraordinary market” at the global quarterly results announcement, though CEO Tim Cook emphasised that “there’s a lot of headroom” to expand with the growing middle-class logging into the iPhone ecosystem.
The praise for India, which has now become a regular feature at Apple’s quarterly results, came at a time when the company’s quarterly sales and profit beat Wall Street expectations, but revenue from China dipped 2.5% on growing competition and iPhone restrictions in certain government departments.
However, Cook praised India and a clutch of other markets in his assessment on results. On India, the Apple CEO said, “We had an all-time revenue record (in the September quarter) in India... we grew at very strong double digits. It’s an incredibly exciting market for us and a major focus of ours.”
However, he added that the momentum is just beginning in the market where it opened two company owned stores for the first time this year (in Mumbai and Delhi), and where it has begun online sales through its official channel.
“We have a low share in a large market and so it would seem that there’s a lot of headroom there... We see an extraordinary market - a lot of people moving into the middle class... Lots of positives, we put two retail stores there and they are doing better than we anticipated - it’s still early going but they are off to a good start and I couldn’t be happier with how things are going at the moment.”