Batching to IOS not working ???

So my game 'appears' to be well optimised. In the Unity player the batching appears to be working - there are only 6 or 7 draw calls ... However when i build to iPhone... the batching is simply not working... i'm losing 20 frames per second just for putting 40 quite small sprites on screen. it's an iphone4 and i'm really sure the problem is not in the update loop or anthing. it's the simple act of rendering a few objects that should be batched that is slowing it down. I do create all my own gameObjects in code. This has never been a problem exporting to Android but this is the first time i've gone Unity to IOS and this has just cropped up right at the end.

Any clues Greatly appreciated!

EDIT

here is the output from the IOS built in profiler

iPhone Unity internal profiler stats: cpu-player> min: 22.6 max: 51.0 avg: 25.6

cpu-ogles-drv> min: 1.0 max: 1.9 avg: 1.1

cpu-present> min: 0.8 max: 5.4 avg: 1.5

frametime> min: 26.9 max: 66.9 avg: 30.8

draw-call #> min: 11 max: 11 avg: 11 | batched: 92

tris #> min: 298 max: 302 avg: 300 | batched: 200

verts #> min: 632 max: 640 avg: 637 | batched: 405

player-detail> physx: 0.4 animation: 0.0 culling 0.0 skinning: 0.0 batching: 1.2 render: 7.4 fixed-update-count: 1 .. 3

mono-scripts> update: 15.5 fixedUpdate: 0.0 coroutines: 0.0

mono-memory> used heap: 5312512 allocated heap: 7921664 max number of collections: 1 collection total duration: 20.3

thanks :)