Announcing financial results for the quarter ending March 31, 2018, Apple reported 16 per cent revenue growth with quarterly revenue of $61.1 billion. International sales accounted for 65 percent of the quarterly revenue. While answering questions, Apple CEO Tim Cook stated that India is an important growth market for the company. While talking about the Indian operations, Cook said, "We set a new first-half record. So we continue to put great energy there and our objective over time is to go in there with all of our different initiatives from retail and everything else. And so we're working toward those things. It's a huge market and it's clear that many people will be moving into the middle class over time, as we've seen in other countries."
He further added, "India is the third largest smartphone market in the world. There's obviously huge opportunities for us and we have an extremely low share in that market overall. And so we're putting a lot of energy there and working with the carriers in that market and they're investing enormously on the LTE networks. And the infrastructure has come quite a way since we began to put a lot of energy in there because of their leadership and so forth." For instance, Apple is launching the Apple Watch Series 3 Cellular with Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio in India.
During the last couple of years, Apple has been aggressive in India. The Cupertino giant has been launching most of its hardware within a month or two of the global launch. For instance, the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and Apple Watch Series 3 was launched in India just a week after it went on sale in the US. The iPhone X was launched on the very same day as the global launch. Although scheduled to launch in India in May this year, Apple launched the iPhone 8 Red and the new iPad 6th generation in April itself. India is coming up as a potential growth market for Macs as well. Apple has sold 4.1 million Macs, generating year-over-year growth in many emerging markets including Latin America, West Asia and Africa, Central and Eastern Europe and India.