On the Call: COO Tim Cook addresses iPad supply after Apple postpones international launch

On the Call: Apple COO Tim Cook

SEATTLE — Before Apple Inc. started selling the iPad on April 3, some industry experts were skeptical about its potential to capture the masses’ imagination. It wasn’t a phone and it wasn’t a computer, so what would people do with it?

So far, consumers don’t seem concerned. Apple has sold more than 500,000 of the new gadget, enough that it has had to postpone its international launch by a month. As expected, analysts pressed the company for a read on the supply chain during a conference call on Tuesday. Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook offered a rosy response.

QUESTION: Can you talk about your iPad production capacity?

RESPONSE: “We’ve done very well versus our planned capacity, and so there’s not a production problem, per se. There’s a — there’s sort of a good kind of issue to have. The demand in the U.S. was much, much stronger than we predicted. So regrettably we had to push out (the) international launch to be able to launch the 3G unit in the U.S. and to get enough Wi-Fi units into the United States. And so we are adding capability, and we’ll see where this thing goes, but it has shocked us, the level of demand, at least initially.”