Kindle Sales Figures Update

Amazon announced today that the Kindle line has been selling more than 1 million units per week for the past three weeks, with the Fire leading the charge as the best selling of the bunch. In addition, the press release states that the Kindle Fire has been the number one product across all of Amazon for the full 11 weeks it's been available to order. As usual, no specific breakdown of numbers was forthcoming, but this alone is more than Amazon generally reveals, and pegs the Fire at somewhere above a quarter million sales per week, with "demand accelerating" according to the release.

In a related report, Goldman Sachs projects that Amazon could sell as many as 6 million Fire tablets by year's end, plus another 8 million of the other Kindle models for a total of 14 million units sold in the final three months of 2011. The report goes on to predict between 15.5 and 20.5 million Kindle Fire devices will be sold in its first year of life. Meanwhile, a Morgan Stanley study projects 82 million iPads to sell next year, an increase in expectation of 42%. IDC reported some specific third quarter numbers that come close to, but don't quite jive with, those given in the earlier iSuppli report I commented on in a prior post, placing pre-Fire tablet sales in this order [iSuppli numbers given in brackets]:

1. Apple iPad 2 - 11.1 million for 61.5% of the market [11,123,000 / 69.7% market share]
2. Samsung Galaxy Tab - (+/-) 1 million for  [1,250,000 / 7.8%]
3. HP Touchpad - 903,000 with 5% of the market (due to their $99 pre-Kindle Fire "fire sale") [not included in iSuppli figures, possibly due to the Touchpad being cancelled]
4. Barnes & Noble Nook(s) - 805,000 for 4.5% [750,000 / 4.7%]
5. Asus - 4% share, no unit figures given [presumably included in iSuppli 4.3% "Others" category, but not specified]
6. HTC - [not included here, but inexplicably given 5th place above Asus by iSuppli with 253,000 units sold and just 1.6% of the market]

Amazon has, of course, completely altered these figures for the final quarter of the year by taking second place with an estimated 14% market grab in just a matter of a few short weeks. This just goes to show how uncertain and unstable the tablet market is right now. The only thing that can be said for sure is that the market is growing at a rapid rate (IDC projects worldwide tablet sales for 2011 to reach 63.3 million), and who is doing well at any given point is - literally - up for grabs.