Kindle Fire Sales Dropped Drastically In 2012

The last quarter of 2011 can be considered the quarter of Amazon with the company selling 4.8 million Kindle Fire devices.

This was an immense success for a seven inch tablet and no one, not even Amazon, was anticipating it.

However, the rise of Kindle Fire was kind of meteoric since the first quarter of 2012 has seen a sharp decline in the sales of Kindle Fire.

The total number of tablets sold during the first quarter of 2012 happens to be 17.4 million, which is 1.2 million lower than the prediction of International Data Corporation (IDC). This was a 38.4 percent decline in the overall which, once again, higher than the anticipated 34 percent.

When we talk of the market share of Amazon specifically, the decline is very sharp.

During the last quarter of 2011, the market share of Amazon rose up to 16.8 percent, thanks to Kindle Fire. But during the first quarter of 2012, the market share dropped to just about 4 percent.

With this market share, Amazon is at third place with Samsung and Apple being at second and first respectively.

So the first quarter of 2012 has not been very good for Amazon since, other than the decline in the share of Kindle Fire, there is a lot of unrest against the tech giant from the publishers and retailers, with some of them even boycotting Amazon products and services.

As expected, the dominance of Apple was retained during the first quarter of 2012 and Apple managed to sell a large number of iPads.

Two main things have played their role in this continuation of Apple’s dominance: Apple’s decision to keep iPad 2 as a low price device, and the strategy of positioning iPad as an all-purpose device, instead of a mere content consumption tablet. During the first quarter of 2012, Apple shipped 11.8 iPads while this number was 15.4 during the last quarter of 2011.

However, the word wide share of Apple during the last quarter of 2011 was 54.7 percent which rose up to 68 percent during the first quarter of 2012.