China has always been important for Apple manufacturing, with marque products such as the iPhone and iPad originating in the Asian giant. However, now China is also becoming an important source for sales revenue. China’s 1.33 billion people are now Apple’s second-best revenue-generating market. Little wonder Apple CEO Tim Cook Tuesday calls China “an enormous opportunity” for the tech giant.
China provided around $15 billion of the more than $108 billion Apple earned in fiscal 2011, or about one in every six dollars Apple stashed in the bank this year. The entire Asian Pacific region brought in $6.53 billion, registering a 61 percent jump in computer sales. Compare that to the $9.64 billion earned in the Americas, or the $7.34 billion in European CPU sales.
How time flies. Just last year, China sales earned Apple just $3 billion with the Asian nation comprising just two percent of the Cupertino, Calif. company’s income.
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.
