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'Apple wants to open in the best 20 retail locations in the UK,' Chris Braithwaite, a director of Cushman and Wakefield,' told the Scotsman. 'It has just told us to get on and find the space.'

Apple UK's managing director, Mark Rogers, declined to comment.

There are currently six stores in England

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with a seventh to open soon. The flagship London store established itself as Apple's second most lucrative among all its stores in the UK, USA, Canada and Japan. The Scotsman believes two of the new locations will be in Scotland, in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Business newspaper FinanzNachrichten has claimed that Apple is planning to expand its retail empire into Germany by opening stores in Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Cologne and Berlin. The company is said to have registered Apple Retail Germany GmbH as a trademark.

Despite widespread misgivings, given the failure of other PC makers to establish a viable high street presence, Apple's retail stores have been a considerable success, generating more than a billion dollars of sales in the last quarter alone. This success is reported to have prompted Microsoft to seek premises for its own store.