It is said that quite a few iPhone owners are eagerly waiting to switch from AT&T to Verizon Wireless. comScore expects that the Verizon-Apple deal shakes up the mobile marketplace “as consumers who are either current iPhone subscribers or in the market for one now have the option of choosing a carrier.”
At the moment, Verizon Wireless is leading the U.S. mobile market with 31% of mobile subscribers and is followed by AT&T with its 27% share. However, when it comes to smartphone adoption, AT&T holds a commanding lead with 38% marketshare, compared to Verizon’s 27%. Then again, AT&T has seen its smartphone share declining 7 percentage points in the past year, while Verizon has climbed 4 percentage points thanks to its DROID offering.
comScore (and common sense for that matter) suggests iPhone users represent attractive subscribers for Verizon, with most of them being in higher income brackets — 81% of iPhone users have a household income of at least $50k and 47% of users report a household income of at least $100k. Moreover, iPhone users are 22% more likely than an average mobile subscriber to be male, though I’m not sure how that counts.
Possibly the most important is that iPhone users have displayed loyalty to the Apple brand (and consequently to AT&T) with more than half of users having a subscription for more than three years (54.6%) and 28.2% of subscribers holding their subscription for 1-3 years.
So what do we take from this? Err… nothing new. Verizon’s deal with Apple will definitely show just how much people hate AT&T. We’ll keep reporting on the battle of two giant operators. Stay tuned…
