Apple confirmed that they still make a lot of money during their Q3 earnings results yesterday. One point of interest in said earnings, however, was that over half of its revenue was coming from overseas markets. It would appear that China is probably the biggest of those markets.
During the earnings call yesterday, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that revenue in China was at $5.7 billion in Q3, which is a 48 percent increase over last year. To make that sound even more impressive, Apple has made about $12.4 billion in China so far this year. They made $13.3 billion in total in China last year. With one more quarter to go, Apple is on target to smash last year’s revenue.
With the global economic climate finally affecting China, however, Apple does stand to lose a bit of their momentum in the country. Mac sales were down in the region from last year and revenue growth is slowing down. It would appear that device sales are actually growing though. Cook said that iPhone sales are growing in China by 100 percent year-on-year. Unfortunately, the new iPad launch couldn’t be counted into their Q3 results for the country. We’ll be able to see next quarter if the iPad makes any discernable gain in China.
It should be noted that Apple isn’t doing bad anywhere, especially China. The effects of the global economic crisis have definitely taken their toll, but Apple is still making a lot of money. To hopefully combat that, Apple will be launching China-specific services in iOS 6 to increase sales in China. You may recall that Apple announced at WWDC that Siri would soon be speaking Chinese and that Chinese search engine, Baidu, would be providing search for Apple devices going forward.
Now if only Apple could stop every Chinese company from suing them, they could operate in the nation unscathed. Settling with Proview may have made sense at the time, but now it’s opened the floodgate of litigation. Every Chinese company will be wanting a piece of them now. It will be interesting to see how the company handles all of these lawsuits while still trying to grow their already sizable market in the country.
[h/t: TechCrunch]