Kindle Fire Shipments Fizzle
Amazon likes to tout the Kindle Fire as “the #1 bestselling, most gifted, and most wished for product” it peddles (without ever disclosing actual sales numbers). But evidently that doesn’t mean quite as much as you’d think. After an initial and impressive surge, sales of the device appear to be declining — precipitously.
According to IDC’s review of worldwide tablet shipments for the first quarter of 2012, Kindle Fire shipments dropped from 4.8 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011 to less than 750,000 units last quarter.
From 16.8 percent to “just over 4 percent” global market share is a swift decline indeed, and enough to cost Amazon its second-place spot in IDC’s ranking of tablet vendors. Amazon is now in third place, behind Samsung.
In the first-place slot: Apple. While the company shipped 11.8 million iPads in the first quarter, down from 15.4 million units in the fourth, that was more than enough to maintain its dominant position and grow its market share to 68 percent from 55 percent.
One last detail worth noting: Worldwide tablet shipments for the quarter reached 17.4 million units, about 1.2 million units below IDC’s projections. That said, they were more than double the 7.9 million units shipped in the same period a year earlier.
(Image courtesy of Someecards)
