The iPhone’s First Full Quarter on Verizon

Jenna Wortham, reporting for the NYT last week:

On Friday, while reporting its quarterly earnings results, Verizon said it activated 2.3 million iPhones during the company’s second quarter. That is a hefty figure, because the device has been available on Verizon for only a few months, but it paled in comparison to AT&T’s iPhone activations for the same quarter. On Thursday, AT&T reported that it had activated 3.6 million iPhones on its network, and that nearly a quarter of them were for new customers to AT&T.

Wortham’s story is about Verizon, so it makes sense to focus first on the fact that the iPhone continues to sell better on AT&T. But what I find interesting is how much better it’s selling than Android phones:

Although Verizon continued to achieve sales from its catalog of Android and 4G devices, the company sold far fewer of those devices than they did iPhones. For the quarter, the company reported sales of 1.2 million LTE and Android devices, which includes tablets, smartphones and wireless modems.

So Verizon sold twice as many iPhones as all Droids combined.

[Update: What the NYT reports above is not what Verizon reported. On page 9 of Verizon’s report (PDF from a PowerPoint deck), they report: “2.3 million iPhone 4 units activated” and “1.2 million 4G LTE device sales”. So that 1.2 million number does not include 3G Droid phones. Neither “Android” nor “Droid” appears anywhere in their report. They simply don’t report the total number of Droid phones sold (nor total smartphones).]

Perhaps Verizon’s iPhone sales were temporarily inflated last quarter because they only just started carrying it. But on the other hand, maybe there are a lot of would-be Verizon iPhone customers who are waiting for the iPhone 5 in September. And keep in mind that Verizon, for now, only has the premium-priced iPhone 4; AT&T has the 3GS, which they sell for just $49 subsidized. I expect Verizon to eventually match AT&T in iPhone sales.

★ Friday, 29 July 2011