Amazon’s Kindle Fire had a huge holiday season by all accounts, with fourth-quarter sales that may have exceeded 4 million units according to analyst estimates. While a number of analysts made predictions that Amazon’s $199 tablet would take a bite out of iPad sales — Morgan Keegan’s Travis McCourt thought the Kindle Fire could cost Apple as much as $1 billion in holiday sales — it looks as though Apple’s iPad business emerged unscathed. Read on for more.
Following Apple’s first-quarter earnings report, which was the most profitable quarter ever reported by a technology company, CEO Tim Cook stated on the company’s earnings call that the Kindle Fire had no impact on iPad sales whatsoever. Cook said that he looked very carefully at Apple’s iPad numbers and he is convinced that Amazon’s tablet didn’t affect iPad sales. Apple’s chief executive noted that he even scrutinized the company’s iPad numbers in the U.S. each week following the Kindle Fire’s launch and saw nothing.
BGR reviewed the Amazon Kindle Fire in November and we said the affordable tablet would likely do big numbers during of the holiday shopping season in 2011 and beyond. We also said that Amazon’s tablet and Apple’s iPad were two entirely different beasts; rather than building an iPad competitor, Amazon created a brand new market segment with the Kindle Fire that it will likely own for the foreseeable future.
