Home improvement retailer Lowes recently rolled out over 40,000 iPhones for its staff to use on the sales floor for inventory checks, product orders and customer service. Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer shared the news during the company’s fourth quarter earnings report Tuesday afternoon.
“Lowes is in the process of rolling out over 40,000 iPhones with a custom application to allow their store associates to execute realtime inventory checks, product orders and interact with customers with how to videos,” he said.
Lowes retail employees get iPhones for sales help
The retail floor iPhones will give employees a direct link to information for customers, and presumably give Lowes a leg up on its competition.
Lowes isn’t alone in its adoption of Apple’s iPhone in the corporate world. “Additional examples of companies around the world supporting iPhone on their corporate networks include Loral, Royal Bank of Scotland, SAP, Texas Instruments, Jacobs Engineering Group, Healthcare, Jaguar, and Land Rover,” Mr. Oppenheimer said.
Apple also reported selling 17.07 million iPhones during its fourth fiscal quarter, along with 11.12 million iPads, and 6.62 million iPods. Quarterly revenue hit US$28.27 billion, and the company showed a $6.62 billion profit. Gross margins for the quarter came in at 40.3 percent, up from 36.9 percent compared to the same quarter last year.
“iPhone continues to be adopted as a standard across the enterprise with 93 percent of the Fortune 500 deploying or testing the device up from 91 percent last quarter,” Mr. Oppenheimer added. “And 60 percent of the global 500 are testing or deploying iPhone, up from 57 percent last quarter.”