In his own words: Tim Cook on Apple earnings and more
iPhone outside of the U.S.
Sequentially we increased over 70 percent from the September quarter, which was 3.5 times the market, and so we could not be happier with that. In terms of geographic distribution, we saw our highest growth in China, and it was into the triple digits. And so I would characterize it as we’re extremely pleased.
The iPhone’s screen size
The iPhone 5 offers a new, 4-inch Retina display, which is the most advanced display in the industry. No one comes close to matching the level of quality as the Retina display. It also provides a larger screen size for iPhone customers without sacrificing the one-handed ease of use that our customers love. We put a lot of thinking into screen size and believe we’ve picked the right one.
iPhone demand in the quarter
If you look at the iPhone sales across the quarter, we were very constrained for much of the quarter on iPhone 5. As we begin to produce more and ship more, sales went up with the production. iPhone 4 was actually in constraint for the entire quarter, and sales remained strong. And so that’s how sales progress across the quarter.
Let me make one additional point on this: I know there’s been lots of rumors about order cuts and so forth, and so let me just take a moment to make a comment on these. I don’t want to comment on any particular rumor, because I would spend my life doing that, but I would suggest it’s good to question the accuracy of any kind of rumor about build plans. And I’d also stress that even if a particular data point were factual, it would be impossible to accurately interpret the data point as to what it meant for our overall business, because the supply chain is very complex, and we obviously have multiple sources for things. Yields might vary, supplier performance can vary, the beginning inventory positions can vary, I mean there’s just an inordinately long list of things that would make any single data point not a great proxy for what’s going on.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
http://www.macworld.com/article/2026141/in-his-own-words-tim-cook-on-apple-earnings-and-more.html
