The U.S. isn’t the only country racking up record iPhone sales: France Telecom’s Orange brand reports an impressive 77% of their handset sales this holiday season were for Apple’s popular device, and the CEO says they’re happily reinvesting some of that moolah back into their data infrastructure.

France Telecom CEO Didier Lombard told the French business paper Les Echos that the recently reported data woes among iPhone users here and on U.K. carrier O2 are not the case in the land of Paris, according to 9to5Mac.

“We have not had this problem,” Lombard explains, “because we have not hesitated to invest in infrastructure.” The report makes for a refreshing change of pace from the generally moody AT&T news here in America.

“In one year, the consumption rate has been multiplied by 2.6 in France, 3.6 in the United Kingdom, 3.2 in Belgium, 3.3 in Switzerland and even 2.0 in Romania, yet in recession,” the CEO boasts, also predicting that bandwidth demand will double again this year.

The Orange boss was also happy to report the company’s year-end sales reached a “historic” level, with iPhones flying out of Orange doors. Bernstein Research recently claimed over 600,000 iPhones were sold during the third quarter of 2009 in France alone, with between 1.8 and 2 million devices sold during the entire year -- that’s almost 10% of the entire French mobile phone market.

It might help that Lombard himself is an iPhone fan who access the Internet daily on his own handset. “At present, I don’t know of a smartphone so well-built for the mobile Internet which is also so good to use,” he said.

But Lombard is quick to point out that France Telecom “isn’t at the mercy of Apple,” and has also created its own mobile store as well as selling devices from other companies, particularly Android-powered handsets.