Apple hits record revenue of $111.4 billion in Q1 2021, doubles market share in India

Apple on 27 January announced its financial results for the fiscal 2021 first quarter ended 26 December 2020. The company revealed in an official release that it has record revenue of $111.4 billion in the quarter, up 21 percent year over year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $1.68, up 35 percent. Apple’s international sales accounted for 64 percent of the quarter’s revenue. Meanwhile, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the company doubled its business in India in the December quarter. Cook attributes the success in India to its recently launched online store in the country. Apple says it registered a market share of 4 percent during the festive quarter of 2020 and witnessed around 60 percent growth in the full year 2020. “… If you take India as an example, we doubled our business last quarter compared to the year-ago quarter. But our absolute level of business there is still quite low relative to the size of the opportunity,” Tim Cook said during an analyst call. [caption id=“attachment_8978001” align=“alignright” width=“1280”]  Apple logo. Image: Apple Events page[/caption] Apple launched the **online store in India on 23 September** , offering Apple’s full range of products and customer support across the country, for the first time. “India is one of those, where our share is quite low. It did improve from the year-ago quarter. Our business roughly doubled over that period of time. And so, we feel very good about the trajectory. We are doing a number of things in the area. We put the online store there, for example, and last quarter was the first full quarter of the online store,” Tim Cook said. (Also read:  _Apple leads global smartphone shipments with iPhone 12 series during Q4 2020_ ) Cool also revealed that in the December quarter the company hit a new high watermark for its installed base of active devices, with growth accelerating as it passed 1.65 billion devices worldwide. “Our December quarter business performance was fuelled by double-digit growth in each product category, which drove all-time revenue records in each of our geographic segments and an all-time high for our installed base of active devices,” said Luca Maestri, Apple’s CFO. “These results helped us generate record operating cash flow of $38.8 billion. We also returned over $30 billion to shareholders during the quarter as we maintain our target of reaching a net cash neutral position over time.” Apple’s Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.205 per share of the Company’s common stock. The dividend is payable on 11 February 2021 to shareholders of record as of the close of business on 8 February 2021.