Verizon this week said that it sold 4.2 million iPhones in the fourth quarter, more than two times every previous quarter.
The carrier also sold 2.2 million 4G devices, Fran Shammo, Verizon's chief financial officer, said during yesterday's Citi Global Entertainment, Media, and Telecommunications Conference.
Back in January 2011, Verizon said its goal was to move 11 million iPhones during the year. Shammo said that as of Dec. 21, Verizon still had 120,000 iPhone 4S devices on backlog, so combining that number with the number of iPhones sold, "we came extremely close to that goal of 11 million," Shammo said.
"It was critical for us to add the iPhone to our portfolio; it is a very dynamic handset," Shammo said when asked if Verizon was pleased by the smartphone's performance. "It's very popular with our customer base [and] it's attracting new customers back to Verizon, [who] we had lost when we didn't have an iPhone."
That being said, the iPhone is "just one piece of our porfolifo," he continued. "We sold more Droid phones than we did Apple phones" during the quarter, he said.
Sales of the iPhone were actually down in the third quarter, when it sold 2 million iPhones, thanks to the rumor frenzy surrounding the possible launch of an iPhone 5. Customers eager for the next-gen iPhone held on to their current smartphones in anticipation of Apple's newest toy, which dropped in mid-October. Verizon then saw a big pickup as users snapped up the iPhone 4S. "We ran out on the first day," Shammo said in October.
When asked about the tiered data pricing that Verizon put in place last year, Shammo said it was necessary because of the surge in LTE and video usage. "The usage pattern is going to continue to increase," he said.
Verizon recently celebrated the first anniversary of its 4G LTE network, which is available in 190 markets. Late last year, however, it experienced a series of 4G connectivity problems, which it attributed to growing pains.
At this point, Shammo said "smartphone use on LTE is little bit more than 3G but ... there's no real major difference in the usage."
Last month, Verizon announced a $3.6 billion deal to purchase more than 100 spectrum licenses from three of the nation's top cable providers—Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Brighthouse. The deal also included agreements to sell each others' products and services. Comcast could bundle Verizon Wireless service with one of its packages—get Xfinity triple play plus Verizon Wireless mobile service for one price, for example.
When asked about these types of deals, Shammo acknowledged that Verizon has not been very open to such partnerships in the past.
"I think that if you look back, people would say that Verizon was very hard to play with," he said. "But over the last two to three years ... it's important now that we can create more value by partnering than by trying to build everything on our own."
He pointed to the mobile payment system ISIS as one such partnership.
One deal that probably won't happen, however, is a Verizon acquisition of Netflix, which was rumored to be in the works last month.
"There's been a lot of rumors in the marketplace about what I'm buying and what I'm not buying: I'm not buying anything," Shammo said. "We are looking at a lot of different opportunities, but I would say they're opportunities more from a partnership or a revenue-sharing opportunity. This is not me going out and buying something. If I look at this, this is still a search-and-seek type effort about what do we want to do, what works for us."