Steve Jobs never considered India as an opportunity for exalting the company’s sales figure. But, his successor seems to have a different opinion and is apparentlt visiting the country during this week. This will be Cook’s first visit to India, as the CEO of Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL)
Industry insiders have obvious reasons to state the purpose of the visit.
Apple’s last quarter report showed a significant reduction in revenue. This year, on April 27, the company posted a quarterly revenue of $50.6 billion which is approx. short of $8 billion in comparison with last year quarterly figure.
Lesser the revenue, lesser the profits. The company has experienced a slowdown in its major territories; America and China, 10 & 26 percent respectively.
This is an alarming issue for the CEO because Apple has never recorded a decline in profits, since 2003. The iPhone, which is the principle revenue generator for the company has evidently failed to attract the attention.
And, it seems, the company has exhausted its major consumers. Meanwhile, we cannot forsake the presence of its competitors, consistently improving the quality and usability of their smartphones.
In such a tricky situation, Tim Cook’s visit to India seems like an effort to revive the sales figures. Reason being, India was the only bright spot in the quarterly reports as Iphone sales rose 56 percent during the first quarter.
Further, Cook has a lot of expectations with the LTE rollout in India. He said “that absence of LTE has held us back over the years. Now, with LTE, India can expect really good networks which will incidentally unleash the power of an iPhone like no other network”-
He also added that, “as of now India is where China was around 8 years back. It is the third largest smartphone user in the world”.
As of now, globally, Apple is predicting another slow quarter whereas it still is expecting a lot from India as India’s top network providers viz. Airtel, Vodafone and Idea are geared up to spread their 4G services across the nation.
