Apple’s dream run with the iPhone continues and its love story with India continues to deepen. The company reported fiscal third-quarter results that beat Wall Street expectations for both earnings and sales, driven by stronger services sales that grew massively on an annual basis.
India’s potential is something the company CEO Tim Cook is always happy to talk about, especially after the opening of its first two offline retail stores in the country. He said: “You know we did hit a June quarter revenue record in India and we grew strong double digits. We also opened our first two retail stores during the quarter and, of course, it’s early going currently, but they are currently beating our expectations in terms of how they are doing. We continue to work on building out the channel and putting more investment in our direct-to-consumer offers as well. And so I think if you look at it, it’s the second largest smartphone market in the world and we ought to be doing really well there and we are very pleased with our growth there. We still have a very, very modest and low share in this smartphone market, so I think it’s a huge opportunity for us. And we are putting in all of our energies to make that occur.”
The Cupertino-based tech giant posted sales of $81.8 billion for the quarter ended in July, which is slightly down 1.4 per cent from the prior year but largely in line with analyst estimates. Luca Maestri, Apple’s CFO, said: “We set an all-time revenue record for iPhone in India.” Fielding questions from analysts, Luca said: “We set June quarter records and revenue growth in double digits for iPhone in India with a very strong performance there.”
Needless to say, Apple’s service business is looking better than ever. It includes everything from the App Store to Apple Music, other subscription services (like iCloud), and AppleCare Plus. “We are happy to report that we had an all-time revenue record in services during the June quarter, driven by over one billion paid subscriptions, and we saw continued strength in emerging markets thanks to robust sales of iPhone,” Cook has said.
The positive outlook comes at a moment when Apple is gearing up for a new iPhone series. iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max are expected to have a new titanium frame, smaller bezels than ever before and, of course, plenty of camera upgrades. As for the standard iPhone 15 and 15 Plus, these are rumoured to be getting the Dynamic Island, which will encourage developers to experiment more with the interface element. Also, the next set of iPhones are expected to make the change from Lightning connector to USB-C.
