Verizon announces that iPhone represents almost two-thirds of its smartphone activations (6.2M out of 9.8M) in holiday quarter

Verizon is out today with its earnings for Q4 2012. While reporting a record-high of 2.1 million retail postpaid subscribers and over $30 billion in consolidated quarterly operating revenue for the first time, the company also announced some significant smartphone numbers. Specifically, Verizon revealed that 63.3-percent of its new smartphone activations were iPhones.

According to a CFO Fran Shammo, who spoke to investors on a conference call today (via AllThingsD), Verizon activated 9.8 million smartphones during the quarter, 6.2 million of which were iPhone. The executive also noted that tablet sales doubled during the quarter. This isn’t surprising given the carrier launched the Retina iPad, iPad mini, and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 2 during the three-month period.

In Q3, Verizon only sold half as many iPhones. It reported just 3.1 million of 6.8 million activations as iOS. Only 651,000 of those iPhone sales last quarter were iPhone 5, since the device had only a week of sales at the time. As for this quarter, with a full three months of iPhone 5 sales, Verizon apparently confirmed that about half of iPhone sales were LTE models. Therefore, the carrier sold about 3.1 million iPhone 5 units alone during the quarter, and that’s out of the total 7.3 million LTE devices it activated during the 12-week period.

“Verizon seized growth opportunities in the fourth quarter to cap a year of solid progress across the entire business,” said Lowell McAdam, Verizon chairman and CEO. “We delivered a total return of 13.2 percent to shareholders in 2012, and we enter 2013 ready to accelerate the momentum we’ve achieved and create significant shareholder value in the years to come.”