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Amazon put out a press release to let the world know it is sold out of Kindle Fires.
The company also has an event scheduled next week where it is expected to introduce the next generation of the Kindle Fire.
In the press release, it revealed:
“Today, Amazon announced that Kindle Fire is sold out, and that in just nine months, Kindle Fire has captured 22% of tablet sales in the U.S.”
This may be the closest thing to a Kindle sales figure we’ll ever see, given how notoriously tight-lipped Amazon is. But how many did it actually sell?
Luckily, the Apple-Samsung patent trial forced both companies to throw open their books and release U.S. sales figures, which we can use to approximate U.S. Kindle Fire sales. Other than Amazon, Samsung is the largest manufacturer of Android tablets, which are still tiny relative to iPads.
From the fourth quarter of 2011 through the second quarter of 2012, Apple and Samsung together sold 16.7 million tablets in the U.S. The vast majority of those are iPads.
As a baseline scenario, let’s assume that Apple and Samsung took the 78 percent of the market not held by Amazon. That’s highly unlikely, but for sake of argument, that yields 21.4 million tablets sold in the U.S. during this period. Amazon would have sold 4.7 million Kindle Fires in that scenario.
More likely, Apple and Samsung accounted for around 70 percent of the market. In this case, 23.8 million tablets were sold and Amazon sold 5.2 million Kindle Fires in the U.S..
At the high end, if Apple and Samsung only accounted for 65 percent of the market—which was approximately Apple’s global tablet market share last quarter—then 25.7 million tablets were sold in the U.S. and Amazon sold 5.6 million Kindle Fires.