AT&T has just announced its third-quarter earnings, again proving that not having an exclusive on the iPhone is no big deal as Apple's handset makes up a cool 77 percent of the company's total smartphone activations for the last three months.
AppleInsider is reporting that AT&T is once again laughing all the way to the bank where the iPhone is concerned, racking up 4.7 million activations of the iconic device while adding 678,000 wireless subscribers during Q3 2012.
Those 4.7 million iPhones is especially impressive when you consider that AT&T activated a total of 6.1 million smartphones during the last quarter. That means Apple's handset made up 77 percent of those sales, with 18 percent being new to Ma Bell.
Curiously, AT&T didn't break out how many of those were the latest iPhone 5 model, but did note there was "considerable pent-up demand" for the handset, which again was released at the tail end of the quarter.
While rival Verizon Wireless may still be the top dog among U.S. carriers, AT&T continues to trump them for iPhone sales -- Verizon only sold 3.1 million such devices in the same quarter, although the company did beat AT&T on overall smartphone activations with a total of 6.8 million, with Android devices accounting for 3.4 million of those.
Despite all the good smartphone news, net profits were down from $6.8 billion in Q2 to only $3.6 billion for the last quarter, primarily blamed on costs to build out its LTE infrastructure as well as $3.8 billion worth of share buybacks. Despite all of that, the company still has free cash flow of $6.5 billion.
All eyes are now on Apple, who will release its own quarterly earnings report on Thursday afternoon, which is sure to pin a number on how many iPhone 5 handsets it sold at launch.
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