New Data Belie Reports of Fading iPhone Demand

If Apple has been cutting iPhone component orders because of waning demand — as some reports claim — you wouldn’t know it from the latest Kantar Worldpanel ComTech data.

For the final quarter of 2012, the iPhone captured 51.2 percent of all U.S. smartphone sales, beating Google’s Android, whose share declined to 44.8 percent, Kantar says.

Now that’s just one data point, but there are a few others that belie those reports of slipping demand. Verizon said this morning that about two-thirds of the smartphones it activated in the fourth quarter were iPhones. And then there was AT&T’s announcement earlier this month that its fourth quarter saw “the best-ever quarterly sales of Android and Apple smartphones.”

So, in the United States — the world’s second-largest smartphone market by volume — the iPhone was the top-selling smartphone in the fourth quarter. And it was a big seller at the country’s top two wireless carriers.

Sound to you like a device for which demand is waning? No one but the folks in Cupertino know for sure. But we’ll all find out tomorrow when Apple reports earnings.