Though historically secretive about Kindle sales, Amazon is finally peeling back the curtain to give a glimpse of how its e-readers and tablets are doing. Pretty damn well right now. The company said that for the third straight week, it has sold well over 1 million Kindle units a week.
The Kindle Fire, said Amazon, continues to be the top selling, most gifted, and wished-for product on Amazon.com since its introduction 11 weeks ago. It’s unclear what the break down of sales is between the other Kindle e-readers, which start at $ 79. And it’s not clear what the total sales figures are for the devices.
But the recent slate of updated devices, along with much anticipated Kindle Fire, have clearly been selling well for Amazon, even despite some middling reviews and customer gripes for the Fire. In fact, demand for the Fire has been increasing over the last three weeks, Amazon said. The holiday performance has been robust enough for Amazon to finally shed some light on sales numbers.
“Kindle Fire is the most successful product we’ve ever launched – it’s the bestselling product across all of Amazon for 11 straight weeks, we’ve already sold millions of units, and we’re building millions more to meet the high demand,” said Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “Our family of Kindle e-ink readers are close behind Kindle Fire on the Amazon.com bestseller list. Customers continue to report preferring their Kindle e-reader for long-form reading, and in fact we’ve seen many customers buy two Kindles – both a Kindle Fire and a Kindle or Kindle Touch – this holiday season.”
The company previously announced that its Black Friday Kindle sales were up 4x over the previous year. Some analysts have predicted Amazon can sell more than 5 million Kindle units this year. Goldman Sachs said Amazon could sell 14 million total units in the fourth quarter including 6 million Kindle Fires.
These are pretty impressive numbers, especially for a tablet that is a far cry from the iPad. But at its $ 199 price, the Kindle Fire is a pretty easy purchase for a holiday gift. And that bodes really well for Amazon as it starts to crank out more software updates and better hardware that makes the Kindle tablet offering even better.
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