New Delhi: Apple is likely to clock more than $1.5 billion in revenue from its laptops in India this year, up about 50% from last year, driven by increasing adoption by larger enterprises such as Wipro and an expanding pool of content creators and app developers .
With this growth, the US-headquartered firm could capture close to a fourth of the overall laptop revenue share in India, as per Counterpoint Research. Apple is already seeing strong demand for its smartphones, shipments of which are expected to touch record levels in 2022.
The overall laptop market in India is expected to be around $6-7 billion in 2022, the research firm said. It said Apple’s personal computers (PC) and laptop shipments across Indian enterprises have grown more than 50% year-on-year in the first half of 2022, although it is still under 5% share of the overall Indian PC enterprise market.
The Apple brand has been enjoying strong demand in the consumer segment for MacBooks as well as from larger enterprises, said Neil Shah, vice president, research at Counterpoint.
“The key reasons being, enterprises are seeing MacBooks as a longer term investment – from getting regular updates for even more than five to seven years, stability, privacy and secure OS (operating system), growing MDM (mobile device management) support, improved performance from computing as well as the battery life perspective, overall reduced total cost of ownership and increasing attraction and retention tool for younger employees to use and sport Apple devices with a coolness quotient attached to it,” said Shah.
Analysts said Apple has done well to expand the number of corporate resellers and its footprint across key tier-1 and tier-2 towns for its offerings which has also helped boost enterprise sales.
Further, amid supply chain issues over the past 15 months, many leading original equipment makers (OEMs) have been struggling to provide premium PCs to enterprises. That is where Apple, with its strong control over the supply chain, has been able to edge out competition, said Shah.
“With its ever-expanding bouquet of hardware and software services, along with a strong focus on security and privacy, Apple is uniquely positioned for growth in its enterprise business in India, said Prabhu Ram, head, Industry Intelligence Group at CMR. “This growth is primarily driven by the growing hybrid and flexible work future and driven by digital natives in the workforce,” he said.
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One of the biggest successes for Apple in India recently was when IT Wipro started offering Apple’s MacBook laptops to attract top talent coming out of university.
Luca Maestri, chief financial officer, Apple, said in a recent earnings call, “Wipro, another large global enterprise customer, is investing in MacBook Air as a competitive advantage when recruiting new graduates globally, thanks to its superior performance and lower total cost of ownership.”
Wipro’s chief information officer Anup Purohit told ET that the move to offer Apple laptops to fresh recruits was based on feedback. “We have spoken to a lot of young people who are about to join the workforce and it’s clear they want to join companies that make use of the latest technologies, and Apple products are the most aspirational for them. Earlier this year, we made the decision to provide our new university hires with MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, which we believe will add to the employee experience.”
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