Amazon selling more than a million Kindles per week, says demand accelerating for the Fire
It's going to be a Kindle kind of holiday for many folks around the globe. Amazon.com today said that it is selling Kindles at a rate of more than one million per week — marking the third consecutive week that it has topped that milestone.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Kindle line has been compounding all year: after Bloomberg reported in December 2010 that Amazon beat its own Kindle estimates by 60 percent, AllThingsD reported in June 2011 that Kindles were on track to approach 10 percent of Amazon's business. The Fire then launched into that installed base fast — BGR counted 95,000 day-one pre-orders in October, and DigiTimes reported in November that Amazon had already gone back for more units.
Today's disclosure closes the loop: three consecutive weeks above one million Kindles per week, with Amazon explicitly saying Fire demand is accelerating into the holidays. The economics behind that pace are deliberate — Amazon set the Fire at a confirmed loss-leading $199, making each sale a bet on downstream content and app revenue rather than hardware margin.
First-order effects
- Every incremental Fire unit puts another customer inside Amazon's Appstore, which the company has positioned as the primary Android app distribution channel for the device — the loss-leading $199 price converts directly into content and commerce traffic this quarter.
- The acceleration forces Amazon's supply chain to keep pace: after the November order increases, holiday sell-through at over a million units a week leaves little slack if demand keeps climbing through Christmas.
Second-order effects
- Rival tablet makers are being undercut on price rather than specs — a $199 device backed by Amazon's storefront pressures competitors whose margins depend on hardware profit, and market researchers have floated (unconfirmed) that the Fire could take second place in the global media tablet market in Q4.
- A UK launch for the Fire has been rumored for January via Know Your Mobile but remains unconfirmed; if it lands, Amazon extends the same subsidized-hardware playbook into a market where iPad rivals have so far competed without a loss-leader.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer tablets split into two structural camps: devices sold at or below cost to feed a content-and-commerce engine, and standalone hardware businesses forced to justify their margins — a divide Amazon's scale makes harder for smaller rivals to bridge.
- The week-over-week milestone reporting itself signals a shift in how device success is measured: attach-rate economics and ecosystem pull replace unit margin as the metric investors and competitors watch.
The trend: Consumer tablet hardware is moving from a device-margin business to a content-and-commerce subsidy play, with Amazon's Kindle Fire as the template and its weekly sales cadence as the scoreboard.