Apple CEO Tim Cook made a surprise visit to an Apple Store in Dubai on Saturday.
Cook unexpectedly walked into the Mall of the Emirates outlet before shaking hands and taking selfies with customers and employees, reported Gulf News.
During his visit, which followed an official trip to India to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Cook named Dubai as a key market for the brand.
He said: “It’s important to have a retail store in key markets. Not every market can support one, but Dubai can clearly support more than one, so it’s great to be here.”
Apple first opened its retail store in Dubai last year. It opened a store in Abu Dhabi shortly after.
The company has witnessed its first fall in revenue since 2003 in the first quarter of this year, when its overall income dropped 12.8 per cent to $50.6 billion.
But Cook said the success of the company is not measured by its revenue, rather by ‘creating the best products.’
“What we are focused on is delivering the best products that really enrich people’s lives,” he said. “That’s the benchmark that we measure ourselves to. We don’t measure it to selling the most or even being first. We don’t measure to that. We’d rather get something right.
“We didn’t have the first Mp3, we didn’t have the first tablet, we didn’t have the first smartphone, we didn’t have the first smartwatch. Being the first or selling the most isn’t the macro objective. Our North Star is to create the best products, and I feel we’re doing that and doing that really well.”
In June, Apple will hold its annual World Wide Developers Conference, during which it is expected to announce the launch of new services. At the 2015 conference, the company announced the introduction of streaming service Apple Music.
Cook said technology could play a major role in empowering people and helping them solve some of the world’s biggest problems.
“I think if you look out and you think about some of the world’s biggest problems today, technology should be a part of the solution of all of that,” he said. “That’s why we get up in the morning. The world has lots of big challenges and some things which are basic are also profound, like feeding people and clean water and clean air and trying to get people to live better longer. I think we can play a role in many of them.”
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