Amazon’s Quarter

MG Siegler on Amazon’s quarterly results:

The company lost $274 million on sales of $13.81 billion. Yes, you read that right. Sure, a large part of it was due to the disaster that is the LivingSocial deal (a loss of $169 million as part of a goodwill write-down), but they still lost over $100 million when you take that away.

I’m sure Apple is really regretting not selling the iPad mini at Kindle Fire prices right now.

Yet here’s Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry at Forbes declaring that Amazon’s $274 million loss compares favorably to Apple’s $26 billion revenue/$8.2 billion profit quarter:

If you put that next to Apple’s lower iPad numbers, it suggests that the Kindle Fire is eating into iPad sales in a significant way. (iPad sales might also have been affected by expectations of the iPad mini.) If true, this is huge. Thus far, no tablet has been able to make a dent in Apple’s domination of the tablet market. Everybody has tried, but nobody had cracked even single-digit end-user marketshare, by most estimates. The Kindle might be changing that.

First, iPad sales did miss analyst expectations, but were still up 26 percent over the year-ago quarter. And let’s see what happens in the holiday quarter with the iPad Mini in the mix. Second, we’ll never know how Kindle Fire sales compare to the iPad because Amazon does not release unit sale numbers. Apple takes the heat on missing sales projections but none of its main competitors — Amazon, Samsung, or Google — even release those numbers.

I do think Jeff Bezos and Amazon are doing a great job, but there’s no way you can argue today that they’re anything but behind Apple in the tablet game.

★ Friday, 26 October 2012