India may have its fair share of Apple fans, but Apple is clearly no big fan of India. Yesterday Apple announced its Q3 results for the year 2012 which was a rare miss for the Cupertino-based tech giant as the revenues fell short of Wall Street expectations.
Apple did post a 23 percent jump in revenue from the same quarter the previous year to $35 billion, but that was about $2 billion below Wall Street’s average forecast. CEO Tim Cook blamed the European recession for the flat revenues.
For those who were hoping that India would figure somewhere on Apple’s agenda prepare to remain disappointed. TechCrunch reports, that CEO Tim Cook told investors in a conference call,
We’re not coming to India. AP
“I love India but I believe that Apple has higher potential …in some other countries. That doesn’t mean we’re not interested in India — we are. We’re going to continue putting some energies there, but in the intermediate term there will be larger opportunities elsewhere.”
Forget the Apple store for now. Just recently Apple launched the iTunes in various Asian countries such as Thailand, Philippines, Sri-Lanka etc. Sadly, India was not on the list where the iTunes store was rolled out.
It seems that Tim Cook is carrying on the legacy of Steve Jobs who felt that the cost of running operations in India was much too high and inefficient.
Sales in China, which have been a growth engine for the company, also declined compared to the previous quarter.
The big surprise however was not that India and China didn’t grow for Apple, but the growth in Latin America which saw a tripling in sales.
