Apple’s India business doubles, company sold over a million devices for first time

Apple has posted record revenue of $111.4 billion, up 21 per cent year over year with the new iPhone 12 and iPads significantly raising the numbers. In India, the company sold over a million devices for the first time, a demand triggered by the popularity of iPhone 11 and iPhone XR, media reports said.

“We’re gratified by the enthusiastic customer response to the unmatched line of cutting-edge products that we delivered across a historic holiday season,” CEO Tim Cook said in a statement. “We are also focused on how we can help the communities we’re a part of build back strongly and equitably, through efforts like our Racial Equity and Justice Initiative as well as our multi-year commitment to invest $350 billion throughout the United States.”

Speaking to analysts after the results, the Apple CEO spoke about the market expansion: “This is particularly the case in some of the emerging markets where we’re proud of how we’ve done… If you take India for example, we doubled our business last quarter compared to a year ago, but our absolute level of business there is still quite low relative to the size of the opportunity.”

Cook later said while in India Apple’s market share is ‘quite low’, “it did improve from the year ago quarter, our business roughly doubled over that period of time, so we feel very good about the trajectory.”

The rest of Apple’s product line-up, sales were up by double-digits across the board: iPads accounted for $8.44 billion of the company’s overall revenue, up from just under $6 billion this time last year.

Meanwhile, Apple’s services business — which has long kept the company stable despite shifts in the popularity of its hardware — also saw sharp growth. Revenues surged to $15.8 billion (another all-time record) — from $12.7 billion this time last year.

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He listed reasons for the growth: “We are doing a number of things in the area, we put the online store there for example, and last quarter was the full first quarter of the online store and that has gotten a great reaction to it and has helped us achieve the results that we got to last quarter. We are also going in there with retail stores in the future and so we look to that to be another great initiative, and we continue to develop the channel as well.”

This growth has been recorded by many research firms, including Cyber Media Research which recently said Apple’s share in the Indian smartphone market had doubled to 4% in the festive quarter, as per a report in news agency IANS. This was a 60% jump year-on-year for Apple in India.

The launch of Apple’s online retail store in India has opened up the Indian market significantly for Cupertino, which is now able to deliver across India is under 72 hours, mostly in locations which have no offline retail of the brand, The Indian Express reported. The pandemic also seems to have helped the sales of iPads as an education device in many households.

Globally, Cook said the iPhone sales grew by 17% year-over-year, “driven by strong demand for the iPhone 12 family”. Now iPhones have an active installed base of over 1 billion devices. While the iPad grew 41% the Mac was up 21%, which Cook said reflects “the continuing role these devices have played in our users’ lives during the pandemic”.

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