Although much of Apple’s public exposure is in the U.S. and Western Europe, Asia – particularly China – has recently grown in prominence. Indeed, Tuesday, Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook said the tech giant earned $2.6 billion in China during the last financial quarter.
The figure encompassing mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan is a four-times increase from just a year ago and almost what the tech giant earned in the area for the entire fiscal 2010.
“The results of that have been staggering,” Cook told analysts Tuesday when announcing the tech giant’s first quarter 2011 results.
In October, Apple unveiled an online store aimed squarely at the Chinese audience, a move designed to complement it four bricks-and-mortar retail locations in country.
In the Asia Pacific area as a whole, Apple racked-up almost $5 billion in sales, 2.5 times that of a year ago.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
