Tiernan Ray reports for Barron’s, “Raymond James’s Tavis McCourt today charts what he deems the very strong dominance of Apple‘s (AAPL) iPhone in the U.S., and its slowing presence abroad.”

First, Apple is dominating the U.S. smartphone market, and second, international growth is slowing dramatically… iPhone sales at AT&T and Verizon were up 25% y/y combined to 14.8 million, while all other smartphone sales declined by 2% at these two carriers in 4Q12. From a market share basis, Apple took 74% share of smartphones at these two carriers in 4Q12 vs. 69% a year ago. Assuming modest success at Sprint, we can then back into an iPhone sell through estimate outside the U.S. of 29.2 million, which was up 35% y/y, a deceleration from 3Q.

This would be a strong result except for the fact that the comp was easy internationally for Apple as the iPhone 5 launches occurred far earlier this year in most countries than last year’s 4S launch. March will be a tougher comp internationally, and therefore we expect international sell through growth to slow to 15% y/y… in March and stay at that level (comps get much easier, which is why we don’t have growth declining more) unless new iPhone models are launched earlier this year. – Tavis McCourt, Raymond James

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: In other words: Tim’s and Jony’s ‘iPhone plastic’ can’t launch on China Mobile soon enough.