Europe is “not doing justice to the nano,” Apple’s general manager and vice president for the region told a British newspaper Tuesday. The comment came as Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said “customers love the iPod nano.”
“We believe it [the market] is not doing justice to the [iPod] nano, where for £115 ($190) you’ve got 8GB plus a camera,” Pascal Cagni told the Guardian newspaper.
“Our job is to better carry the message. We need to express it better so that people get convinced of what we do,” Cagni said.
The reservations come amid a generally upbeat assessment of Apple’s success in Europe. Apple’s portables “display growth of 35 percent year-on-year” and the company has “immense success all over Europe” with its back-to-school campaign. In fact, Apple has “typically above 20-25 percent market share in each of the [European] countries,” according to Cagni.
Despite Apple’s comment about customers falling in love with the new iPod, sales of its line of MP3 players fell 8 percent, although the company reported a 100% jump in iPod touch sales. Sales of iPods typically surge during the September quarter. The updated iPod nano was released September 9, three weeks prior to the end of the quarter.