Apple reports strong growth in India for fourth straight quarter

“Today, Apple is reporting a very strong quarter with double-digit revenue growth across our product and services categories and in every geographic segment. We set a new June quarter revenue record of $81.4 billion, up 36% from last year, and the vast majority of markets we tracked grew double digits, with especially strong growth in emerging markets, including India, Latin America and Vietnam,” Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple, said last night during the company’s earnings call for the June quarter.

The company has been growing its sales in India over the past year, on the back of its own retail store and growing demand for older iPhones. Apple’s market share in the premium segment grew by 48.8% in the same quarter last year, from 41.2% in the quarter in 2019. As reported by Mint at the time, the company’s shipments in India had grown by 5% year-on-year at the time. Cook had also said that the company reported double-digit growth in the January-March quarter this year.

Analysts attribute Apple’s growth in India to a general rise in demand for electronic products. In addition, the company has been lowering the price of older iPhones, which has made them more accessible for some buyers. The company had doubled its market share in India during the quarter ended December last year. At the time, experts told Mint that Apple’s market share in India grew to 4% in the quarter ended December 2020, against 2% in the December 2019 quarter.

Prachir Singh, senior research analyst at Counterpoint Research, had said that over 50% of the company’s shipments were driven by older iPhones. The iPhone SE (2020) accounted for 30% of the shipments, followed by the 27% for the iPhone 11 and 14% for the iPhone XR. The iPhone 12 series, which launched last year, accounted for the rest.

Answering a question about users who are upgrading and switching from older iPhones, Cook said, “In Q3, we set June quarter records in Mexico and Brazil and Chile and Turkey and UAE and Poland and Czech Republic, India, obviously, and China, as I talked about before, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia. I could go on and name a few more. It’s a very long list. And so those are those results are for the entire line of products that we have.”