During the third quarter, 60 percent of all smartphones sold on U.S. carriers AT&T and Verizon were iPhones.
AT&T announced that it activated 4.7 million iPhones in the third quarter of 2012, with 18 percent from the figure being new to the carrier. It also said that its postpaid results were affected by iPhone 5 inventory constraints.
AT&T and Verizon Wireless’s quarterly earnings for Q3 confirmed that 80 percent of all devices sold last quarter on both carriers were smartphones. 48 percent of all post-paid retail handsets sold were iPhone units.
Verizon later revealed it sold 3.1 million iPhones during the third quarter, 650,000 of which were iPhone 5 units, while total smartphone sales for the carrier equaled 6.8 million during the quarter.
"We had another impressive quarter with strong earnings growth, record cash flows and solid returns to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks," said Randall Stephenson, AT&T chairman and chief executive officer. "In wireless, we had another excellent smartphone quarter, penetration of usage-based mobile data plans continues to climb, and our 4G LTE network build is ahead of schedule. And in wireline, our IP network continues to deliver strong gains in U-verse high speed Internet connections, which helped drive an almost 10 percent increase in broadband data ARPU."
