AppleInsider Staff
Smartphone penetration in the quarter was up 13.8 percentage points from the same period a year ago, when just 36 percent of Verizon subscribers had a smartphone. It also grew 3 points from the first quarter of 2012, the company revealed on Thursday.
Total sales of Apple's iPhone through Verizon Wireless were 2.7 million units, Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo revealed. In comparison, Verizon sold 2.9 million Android-based smartphones, and 2.5 million of those were 4G LTE handsets.
Sales of the iPhone at Verizon were up from 2.3 million in the same quarter a year ago. But sales were also down from the 3.2 million iPhones activated in the first quarter, as customers begin to hold off on buying a new iPhone in anticipation of a new model from Apple expected to arrive later this year.
Shammo also revealed that a quarter of iPhone sales from the second quarter were customers who were new to the carrier. That's higher than the 20 percent of 4G LTE customers who were new to Verizon.
Verizon sells Apple's latest-generation handset, the iPhone 4S, as well as the iPhone 4. The iPhone 3GS, which first launched in 2009 and is still sold for free with a new two-year service plan, is only available through Verizon's chief rival, AT&T.
Analyst Christopher M. Larsen with Piper Jaffray said Verizon's second-quarter results were positive, as the carrier added 888,000 net retail postpaid wireless subscribers. The company's adjusted earnings per share of 64 cents was about in line with the Wall Street consensus.
Malcolm Owen
Oliver Haslam
Andrew O'Hara
Wesley Hilliard
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
27 Comments
If people held off buying iPhones in Q2, Q3 is going to be even worse. Lets hope Apple gets the next one out before the end of Q3 (of verizon's fiscal year)...
Kind of a big presumption and not a fact. Maybe customers simply bought something else (since Android was 2.9 million)? Or this quarter just isn't a high renewal period? There's no facts to back up this part of the article.
[quote name="thataveragejoe" url="/t/151381/verizon-sells-2-7m-iphones-in-q2-smartphone-penetration-hits-50#post_2149983"] Kind of a big presumption and not a fact. Maybe customers simply bought something else (since Android was 2.9 million)? Or this quarter just isn't a high renewal period? There's no facts to back up this part of the article. [/quote] Not sure why you would pick on that comment. They have quite a few precedents to look at I would have thought. Hasn't a drop in sales always happened in the run up to a new iPhone release or iPad, iPod, or MacBook Pro? Can you point to an example of where sales remained unchanged or increased just prior to a release of a new version of any Apple product in the last decade?
I wonder what the penetration would be if Apple had never released an iPhone?
I don't have to and that's not the point. If this is a news article explaining a drop a sales of an item there should be a fact explaining either YoY smartphone sales to understand the trend, or a survey to say people are waiting or something. To just say people are waiting as the sole answer for a quarterly drop in sales may be true, but it's devoid of any further evidence making it an opinion or gross assumption at best, especially in the face of reported higher Android sales during the same period.