Mark Gongloff blogs for The Wall Street Journal that Morgan Keegan analyst Tavis McCourt says that “based on a study of AT&T and Verizon’s quarterly results this week, iPhones are about to put the entire smartphone market in a headlock.”
After analyzing AT&T and Verizon results, we believe it is likely that smartphone sales may have declined in Q3:11 both sequentially and Y/Y for the first time ever in the US.
Obviously, a big part of this was the impact of the iPhone 4S being delayed until Q4, but there are also some ominous signs for Android vendors in these results given that there were a number of Android launches in the quarter at AT&T and Verizon, and yet Android sales likely declined sequentially and had only modest growth Y/Y.
We believe slowdown in Android/Blackberry/WP sales at AT&T/Verizon likely indicates a reasonable number of customers choosing not to upgrade in Q3, but rather waiting to switch to the iPhone in Q4. The strong initial sales figures for iPhone 4S would seem to back up this assumption.
Read more in the full article here.