Amazon has never been shy about tooting its own horn, regularly issuing press releases proclaiming excellent sales figures for the Kindle line of eReaders or more recently the Kindle Fire tablet. But the company has been reluctant to actually say just how many devices it’s sold.

Now the folks at iSuppli have put together an educated guess. They say that Amazon moved about 3.9 million Kindle Fire units in the 4th quarter of 2011, which would make it the second most popular tablet during that period.

Apple’s iPad still takes first place with a 57 percent market share to Amazon’s 14 percent. But according to Amazon, the introduction of inexpensive Kindle Fire and NOOK tablets toward the end of 2011 shook up the market quite a bit, prompting many other tablet makers to lower prices to compete.

The NOOK Tablet, incidentally, came in 4th place with shipments of around 1.9 million according to iSuppli.

There’s no good way to confirm those figures. Amazon has given us a bit of an impossible-to-solve math problem, letting us know that the company shipped a million Kindle devices per week for a number of weeks, and that the top-selling device was the Kindle Fire. But there’s no way to know just how many people have bought Amazon’s Android-powered color tablet and how many have bought Kindle eReaders with E Ink displays.

Apple, on the other hand, regularly issues statements letting the public know exactly how many devices the company has shipped.

While iSuppli isn’t just throwing numbers at a dart-board since the company has sources in the supply chain, I’d take the company’s estimates with a grain of salt.

via Forbes

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers