Amazon had a good weekend. The company says Cyber Monday 2012 was the best day ever for Kindle sales around the world, fueled by the company’s offer of a Kindle Fire 2. In fact, Amazon says it sold twice as many Kindles this weekend as it did between Black Friday and Cyber Monday last year.

What Amazon still isn’t providing is an actual sales figure.

Amazon Kindle Fire 2

While we know that Kindle produces including the Kindle Fire, Kindle Fire HD, and Kindle Paperwhite continue to be among Amazon’s best-selling products, Amazon still hasn’t told us how many tablets or eReaders it’s shipped.

It’s safe to assume that the number is quite large. A lot of folks buy best-selling books, movies, iPods, and other computers from Amazon. So it takes a reasonably large number of sales to stay at the top of the charts.

But while Apple, Motorola, and many other companies regularly report shipment numbers in their quarterly financial reports, Amazon just makes a habit of telling us its products are popular.

Amazon doesn’t really make much, if any, money on hardware sales anyway. Instead, the company wants to get as many Kindles into customers hands as possible… because Kindle owners are more likely to buy eBooks, music, movies, apps, and other content from Amazon.

Some folks like to think of the Kindle Fire as little more than a catalog for Amazon products… but it’s also a product designed to let you access much of the content you can purchase from Amazon including music, movices, books, and games.

If they were a little cheaper to build, I could almost imagine Amazon giving these products away in order to get more people locked into their ecosystem.

But Amazon operates on razor-thin profit margins and selling Kindle products at or near cost is probably an easier pill to swallow than giving them away… especially since a percentage of the folks that buy these products just want to hack them and turn them into general purpose tablets which may or may not be tied to Amazon’s ecosystem.

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One reply on “Amazon sold a lot of Kindles this weekend, still won’t say just how many”

  1. Amazon has no interest in giving their sale numbers. They don’t need to gloat about it and anger OEMs even more than they already are.
    It doesn’t want to see forming an ‘anti-Amazon coalition’.
    Even Google’s business model and role in the market, for now (because if the rumors are true it may follow the same path as Amazon), is accepted because it’s partnering with OEMs which make a profit on the devices sold under the Nexus brand.
    Amazon chose to follow its own path and doesn’t play the same game. And, as you said, profits from Fire’s sales must be low if existent at all, so not a direct concern for shareholders.
    All they care about is profit from the increase in accounts created (which could be a, if not perfect, indication of Fire’s sales) and the increase in products/services sold via increased wallet and/or market share (for any product they actually make a profit on).

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