During Apple’s Q4 2014 earnings call on Monday, Company CEO Tim Cook commented on why he remains “very bullish” on the iPad, saying the market is not saturated, and the iPad still has plenty of room for growth.
Apple sold 12.3 million iPads in the September quarter, versus 14.1 million in the year ago quarter. Although sales were lower than last year, sales of the tablet did come in slightly above Wall Street’s expectations.
“Instead of looking at it every 90 days, if you back up and look at it, we’ve sold 237 million in just over four years. That’s about twice the number of iPhones we sold in the first four years,” said Cook
“If you look at the last 12 months of iPad, we sold 68 million, and in 2013 we sold 71 million. We’re down, but we’re down 4 percent on the sell in [to inventory channels], and the sell through [to end buyers] was a bit better than the negative 4 because we took down channel inventory some.”
Cook added, “I view it as a speed bump, not a huge issue. That said, we want to grow. We don’t like to see negative numbers.”
Apple continues to sell more tablets globally than all of the other top five tablet vendors (Samsung, Asus, Lenovo and Acer), put together. And Cook sees more room for growth.
Cook noted: “If you look at our top six revenue countries, in the country that sold the lowest percentage of iPads to customers that had never bought an iPad before, that number is 50 percent, and the range goes from 50 to over 70.
“That’s not a saturated market,” Cook said. “Because we’ve only been in this business four years, we don’t really know what the upgrade cycle will be for people.
“Over the long arc of time, my own judgement is that iPad has a great future. How the individual 90 day clicks work out, I don’t know. But I’m very bullish on where we can take iPad over time.”
Cook went on to note that Apple is continuing to invest in the product pipeline, and continues to invest in distribution. He then noted emerging markets, such as Brazil, Russia, India and China, were up 20% for the full year.
(Via AppleInsider)
