Tim Cook
That's correct.
Nancy Paxton
Thanks Gene. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator
Scott Craig from Banc of America.
Scott Craig - Banc of America
Hi Tim. I know you guys don't have a lot of experience with the seasonality in the iPhone business, but how do you think about the seasonality here into the fourth quarter and then a question for Peter on tax, can you walk us through why the tax rate going to go up here in the near-term? Thanks.
Tim Cook
Yes. Scott, as you said, when we look at the September to December quarter, we have very few September to Decembers to look at in the iPhone business since we've just been selling for a couple of years. And in fact, in the vast majority of countries, we've only been selling in one and in some of those, just a partial.
And so, honestly speaking, we're new in the business still and I think for me to make any kind of seasonality forecast would not be a good idea. The things that we look at in terms of coming up with our forecast would be the popularity of the iPhone 3GS has been phenomenal. We were very surprised by the demand. We were selling in 64 countries by the end of the quarter. We'll roll out others this quarter, notably China, which has already been mentioned in the call. We hope to roll out in Korea as well. And as Gene mentioned previously, we will be adding some carriers in some countries where we only had one carrier before, such as the United Kingdom and Canada as an example. So, those are the things that we think about as we think about our December forecast.
Peter Oppenheimer
Scott, related to your tax question, our tax rate for the quarter was 26%. And it was below our guidance of 30, primarily due to a higher mix of foreign earnings. But for the year, we were about 29%. The past two years, we've been pretty much right on 30. So, from what I see at this point for fiscal 2010, we'll see about 30% for our tax rate, really consistent with what we've seen in the last couple years.
Scott Craig - Banc of America
Okay, thank you.
Nancy Paxton
Thanks, Scott. Could we have the next question, please?
Operator
From RBC Capital Markets, we'll hear from Mike Abramsky.
Mike Abramsky - RBC Capital Markets |
