Announcing its financial results for the third quarter, Apple informed that it had sold 31.2 million iPhones in the quarter, compared to 26 million in the same quarter, last year, an year on year increase of 5.2 million, or 20 percent.
Peter Oppenheimer, Chief Financial Officer
elaborated that the iPhone 5 remains the most popular iPhone but the company was happy with sales of the iPhone 4 and 4s.
However, iPad sales declined and Apple sold 14.6 million iPads during the quarter compared to 17 million iPads that it sold in the same quarter, last year. It's worth pointing out that Apple sold 19.5 million iPads in the second quarter of 2013. Apple did clarify that the year-over-year comparison should be seen in the light of significant channel inventory increase and that the third quarter of 2012 had seen demand as the third generation iPad went on sale.
Oppenheimer added that Apple had built 1.2 million units of iPad channels inventory in the June quarter, last year while it reduced channel inventory by 700,000 units in the same quarter this year.
Interestingly, both Oppenheimer and Apple CEO Tim Cook mentioned that India was among the select markets where iPhone sales had increased by a huge margin.
In his opening comments, Oppenheimer also mentioned that Apple was particularly pleased with very strong year-over-year growth in iPhone sales in a number of developed and emerging markets including India, US, UK, Japan, Brazil, Russia, Thailand and Singapore.
Responding to a question about the markets driving iPhone ASPs(average sales price) during the Q&A session, Tim Cook mentioned that (sales in) India was up over 400 percent. This means that iPhone sales in Indian have grown 400 percent. Though, he did not get into specifics related to the iPhone models that contributed to this increase, it's likely that the aggressive marketing and exchange offers on the iPhone 4 run by the company's distributors during the last quarter could be the major reason for this increase.
Cook also mentioned that Apple witnessed double-digit unit growth for the iPad in markets such as India, China, Japan, Canada, Latin America, Russia, and the Middle East.