Verizon's activations of older iPhones better than expected
October 18, 2012: 11:01 AM ETSupply issues seem to have held its iPhone 5 activations to about 650,000 in September
Click to enlarge. Source: Company reports.
FORTUNE -- Verizon (VZ) announced Thursday that it activated 6.8 million smartphones last quarter -- 3.1 million iPhones and 3.4 million handsets running Google's (GOOG) Android. That compares with 2.7 million iPhones and 2.9 million Androids in Verizon's second quarter.
The company also said that 21% of its iPhone activations were on its LTE network, which suggests that roughly 650,000 of those activations were iPhone 5s and about 2.45 million were older models.
In a note to clients, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster called the results a "slight positive" for Apple (AAPL).
Based on Verizon's report, it appears that non-iPhone 5 sales were down 9% q/q while we are currently modeling Apple to see a 35% q/q decline in non-iPhone 5 sales in September. The reason we were looking for a 35% q/q decline is due to the impact of customers waiting for the iPhone 5. The bottom line is that we are incrementally more comfortable with our 25 million September iPhone estimate.
