SAN FRANCISCO (Bloomberg) - Apple Inc. rose as much as 5.1 percent in Nasdaq trading after chief operating officer Tim Cook reiterated a goal to sell 10 million iPhones this year and suggested sales will hold up in an economic slowdown.

Apple added $6.01 to $128.97 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading after earlier climbing to $129.25. The shares had declined 38 percent this year before today on concern that US consumers may cut spending on electronics. While Apple is "not immune," the 35 percent rise in sales last quarter suggests that people continue to covet Apple's products, Mr. Cook said.

"What we can control is how much do we innovate, what products do we do, the experience in our stores, the experience in our channel," he said at a Goldman Sachs technology conference yesterday in Las Vegas. "Apple's success depends much more on those things" than shifts in the economy.

Mr. Cook said the number of iPhone handsets that have been unlocked to work on unauthorised wireless networks is a sign of "great demand." Buyers may have unlocked as many as one million of the almost four million iPhones sold last year, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst Toni Sacconaghi estimates.

"Of all the problems that I might face, this is one I face looking at with a little bit of a smile," Mr. Cook said. "To have people stepping over each other to get the iPhone isn't a bad thing."

Apple gets an undisclosed cut of monthly wireless fees for the device and has deals with carriers in the US, UK, Germany and France. Users have hacked the device to work on other carriers' networks, depriving Apple of fees.

Demand in countries where Apple has not signed distribution deals is giving the Cupertino, California-based company "really good confidence" it will meet its forecast to sell 10 million iPhones this year, Mr. Cook said. That would give the company one percent of the global mobile-phone market.

The number of unlocked iPhones is "significant," Mr. Cook said, without being specific. "Very few" iPhone customers have hacked the device in the US, where AT&T Inc. is Apple's exclusive wireless partner, he said.

"People in all these countries around the world that wish we were selling are finding ways to get the phone in their country," Mr. Cook said. "We need to offer the iPhone in more places and we're going to do that this year."

Apple, which pledged to begin selling the iPhone in Asia and other European countries this year, is "seeing no shortage in interest by carriers who want to sell the iPhone," he said. Apple is "not married" to its current strategy of partnering with an exclusive carrier in each country, as it has done in the US, UK, Germany and France, he said.