‘Incredibly exciting market' for Apple: Tim Cook on how India emerged as most preferred market for tech giants

Applauding Apple India’s double-digit revenue growth, Tim Cook described India as an ‘incredibly exciting market’

Expressing his contentment with India’s growing developer community, Apple CEO Tim Cook has said that the South Asian country has become a key market for global tech giants, with a burgeoning developer base attracting significant attention, news agency ANI reported on Saturday.

“We have been very pleased that there is a rapidly growing base of developers in India. Apple is working all of the entire ecosystem from developer to the market to operations, the whole thing,” ANI quoted a post of the Apple CEO and re-twitter by MoS Electronics and Technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar. The report further added the country has become a top priority for global tech companies due to its large talent pool, low operating costs, and stable environment for supply chains.

Applauding Apple India’s double-digit revenue growth, Cook described India as an “incredibly exciting market”, emphasizing its significance as a major focus area for the company.

Cook said that Apple achieved record revenues in India for the quarter ending March 2024, despite a 4 percent drop in overall revenue and a 10 percent decline in iPhone sales from the previous year.

“We did grow strong by double-digit, and so we were very, very pleased with that. It was a new March quarter revenue record for us. As you know, as I’ve said before, I see it as an incredibly exciting market and it’s a major focus for us,” ANI quoted Cook as saying on Apple’s performance in India.

Emphasizing the strategic importance of local production for maintaining competitiveness, Cook said, “From a pragmatic point of view, you need to produce there (India) to be competitive, and so, yes, the two things are linked from that point of view, but we have both operational things going on and we have to go to market and initiatives going on.”

It is important to note that in this continuously evolving era of global geopolitical power, India has emerged as a beacon for global tech corporations. The revenue growth rates for big tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, and Meta in India outpaced their global expansion rates last year.

Apple supported over a million developer jobs in India in 2023, with plans for further expansion.