During the FY Q2 2019 earnings call Apple CEO Tim Cook when answering questions talked about recent iPhone price adjustments in India, expanding local manufacturing and also about its retail store plans.
He said that after the price adjustments for iPhone XR in India, Apple has seen preliminarily some better results. “Everything that we do, does advise everything we do in the future, so we try to learn the best we can and fold that into our thinking. And we’ll obviously do that with this as well,” he added.
Regarding the expansion of local manufacturing earlier this year, opening retail stores, which has been in the news for the past few years, and Android being dominated in India, he said:
I think India is a very important market in the long-term. It’s a challenging market in the short-term. But we’re learning a lot. We have started manufacturing there which is very important to be able to serve the market in a reasonable way. And we’re growing that capability there.
And we would like to place retail stores there. And we’re working with the government to seek approval to do that. And so, we plan on going in there with sort of all of our might.
We’ve opened a developer, accelerator there, which we’re very happy with some of the things coming out of there. It’s a long-term play. It’s not something that’s going to be on overnight huge business. But I think the growth potential is phenomenal.
It doesn’t bother me that it’s primarily Android business at the moment because that just means there’s a lot of opportunity there.