Apple Confident of Opening More Stores in India: Tim Cook

“There’s a huge number of people that will move into the middle class. The government has really focused on reform in a major way and made some very bold moves and I applaud them for doing that, and sort of can’t wait for the future there,” he said.

On some deceleration in key emerging markets, Cook said the emerging markets that Apple is seeing pressure in are Turkey, India, Brazil, Russia. “These are markets where currencies have weakened over the recent period. In some cases, that resulted in us raising prices and those markets are not growing the way we would like to see,” he said.

Cook said Apple’s business in India in Q4 was flat. “Obviously, we would like to see that be a huge growth. Brazil was down somewhat compared to the previous year. And so I think, or at least the way that I see these, is each one of the emerging markets has a bit of a different story, and I don’t see it as some sort of issue that is common between those for the most part,” he said.

The company said it saw a great response to the new MacBook Pro models launched in July, with strong double-digit revenue growth driving an all-time quarterly record for Mac revenue. We were especially pleased with Mac momentum in emerging markets with strong growth in Latin America, in India, the Middle East and Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe, Apple’s Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri said.

Apple sold 9.7 million iPads during the quarter, gaining share in nearly every market it tracked. However, on a year-to-year basis, there was a six per cent decrease in the number of iPads sold, from 10.3 million in Q4, 2017.

“We generated iPad growth in a number of key regions around the world, including Latin America, Europe, Japan, India and South Asia. Among customers around the world purchasing iPads during the quarter, nearly half were new to iPad, and our active installed base of iPads reached a new all-time high,” Maestri said.