Tim Cook on iPhone in China: 900% growth

China has been interesting. If you look at greater China which we define as mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, the iPhone units were up year-over-year over 9 times. We added another 800 points of distribution in China. The revenue, we have never released this number before but I will do this in this particular case, through the first half of the fiscal year that we just completed for the six month period our revenue from greater China was almost $1.3 billion and this is up over 200% year-over-year. So we are well pleased with how the company is positioned to take advantage of the growth in greater China.

via Apple Inc. F2Q10 (Qtr end 03/27/10) Earnings Call Transcript — Seeking Alpha.

Peter Oppenheimer, CFO added:

We are very excited about China not only for retail but for Apple. Tim talked about the success we have had in greater China to date with revenue being up about two time’s year-over-year. With regard to retail stores we will open two stores in Shanghai this summer and with targets of having about 25 stores open in China by the end of calendar 2011.

As a point of reference, the Mac business growth in Asia is also pretty impressive: Mac units in APAC grew 67% vs. 20% in the Americas, 18% in Japan and 37% in Europe.