Apple's iPhone grabs almost two-thirds of Verizon's 9.8M smartphone sales in Q4

Apple's iPhone accounted for 6.2 million of the 9.8 million smartphones Verizon sold in the last quarter, powering record smartphone adoption numbers at the nation's largest carrier even as Verizon posted a big loss for the quarter.

The iPhone across all of its models sold nearly double the number of Android-based smartphones sold in the past quarter. Verizon's Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo revealed that approximately half of the iPhones Verizon sold in Q4 were 4G LTE, meaning that they were iPhone 5 units.

At 63 percent of total Verizon smartphone activations, the iPhone this quarter far outstripped its 47 percent average over the past five quarters. The figure for the fourth quarter was the highest since the third quarter of 2011.

The nation's largest carrier saw $30 billion in revenues for the fourth quarter of 2012, up 5.7 percent over the prior year. Of that, about $20 billion was wireless revenue. For the whole of 2012, Verizon saw $115.85 billion in revenue, up 4.5 percent year-over-year.

The largest negative item for Verizon was a pretax charge of $7.2 billion related largely to pension liabilities. The pension write-down, in combination with expenditures due to Hurricane Sandy, amounted to a total quarterly loss of $1.48 per share.

The carrier saw its total wireless subscriber base grow by five million customers over 2012, the highest growth Verizon has seen in four years. Retail postpaid connections were up 5.9 percent year-over-year.