Where’s the Fire? Kindle Sales Pushing Six Million for the Quarter.
Has anyone seen one of Amazon’s new Kindle Fires in the wild? I haven’t. But evidently they’re everywhere. You just need to know where to look to find them — like Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan.
According to Rohan, the Fire is selling very, very well. So well, in fact, that on Sunday evening he raised his estimate for fourth-quarter Fire sales to six million units from five million, proclaiming the device a true tablet market contender.
“Kindle Fire has staked out an important market position due to its loyal Amazon customer base and attractive (low) device pricing,” Rohan said in a note to clients. “We believe the lower hardware price will correlate with high e-book and video content attach rates.”
In other words, there’s some serious potential upside to be had in incremental e-commerce spending via the Fire, and Amazon’s aim is to milk it for all it’s worth.
“We believe that software attach rates correlate inversely with the hardware price. From Amazon’s perspective, this could drive real upside in its North American media segment revenues,” Rohan concludes. “From a cost perspective, the shift to digital delivery of content could help Amazon avoid costly free shipping subsidies. Hence, we believe there is a great deal more to the Kindle device strategy than most have discounted.”