Larry Dignan, ZDNET:
Amazon’s fourth quarter sales missed projections, but earnings were ahead. The big wild card was Kindle device sales, which tripled over the holidays.
The e-commerce giant reported earnings of $177 million in the fourth quarter, or 38 cents a share, on revenue of $17.43 billion, up 35 percent from a year ago. Wall Street was expecting earnings of 17 cents a share on revenue of $18.25 billion.
Larry says “Kindle sales surged” and “Kindle sales tripled over the holidays.” But then Larry points out that “As per Amazon custom, no hard numbers were disclosed.” So how do you know sales have surged and tripled?
Amazon said that Kindle sales were up 177% year over year. They gave concrete numbers for growth, just not for actual units.
And without unit numbers, those “concrete numbers for growth” are meaningless.
You are right that the numbers are meaningless, and I don’t understand why Amazon still won’t release numbers after having the Kindle out for four years. My only guess is because Amazon isn’t trying to make money off of Kindle sales, and therefore doesn’t see them as relevant to their financial results.
However, my reply was to your comment “So how do you know sales have surged and tripled?” … the author knows the sales (nearly) tripled because Amazon said so.
” I don’t understand why Amazon still won’t release numbers after having the Kindle out for four years.”
Initially, sales weren’t particularly good. Amazon doesn’t release them now because, even though the Kindle is undoubtedly the number one selling “Android tablet” (and I hate calling it that – it’s an “Amazon Delivery Device”), it places a distant, even embarrassing numbers wise second to the iPad.
If Amazon released those sales figures, they’d know the story wouldn’t be “Best selling Android tablet!” but “Amazon fails to make iPad inroads…”