CUPERTINO, Calif. (Diya TV) — Apple sees “huge market potential” to roll out its products in India, and CEO Tim Cook recently said the company is beginning to “really put energy” into the country, which this year will begin rolling out high-speed internet networks for the first time.
This is another huge one. India will be the most populous country in the world in 2022. India today has about 50 percent of their population at 25 years of age or younger. It’s a very young country. People really want smartphones there, really want smartphones,” Cook said during a recent interview with CNBC.
Cook said that while emerging markets like India are untapped giants, the LTE wireless penetration is currently “zero.” As the country begins to change that, the dynamics will shift dramatically, he added.
“And so that’s changing. Huge market potential,” Cook said.
Apple currently has “great innovation” in the pipeline of its products, like new iPhones that he thinks will attract those in the Indian market. The company has never had a great presence in the nation because of its lack of LTE coverage, he said. “What I see is that countries like India have no LTE, so there’s 0 percent penetration. They are selling smartphones, and we sell iPhones there. But arguably you can’t get the full value from it.”
Meanwhile, Apple sales in China, its second-largest market after the U.S., dropped 11 percent last quarter. In India, where it’s almost impossible to obtain the smartphone due to the lack of an established retail chain, sales rose 56 percent from a year ago. “This is pretty big,” Cook said when addressing the growth of sales in India.
As a result, Apple is “now…really putting energy into India,” Cook said, as well as other markets across the globe, “where I think that people sitting here in this country look at it through just a lens of what’s happening in the United States. But there are a lot of people in the world who don’t have the pleasure of owning an iPhone yet.”
But again, the lack of an established retail network is the biggest blockade in the way of Apple’s progress in India. The company’s main challenge is first combatting that issue, where the market represents the same presence today that it was in China seven to 10 years ago, Cook said. While India represents the world’s third-largest smartphone market, it’s been dominated by what the chief referred to as “low-end phones,” because the network and economics in the country, creating a market with no potential.
