Science

Kindle Fire forecast bumped to 5M units in Q4

An analyst has hiked his forecast for shipments of the Amazon Kindle Fire in the fourth quarter. If estimates are accurate, the Fire would become the one of the best selling tablets to date. Second only to Apple's iPad.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor

Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.

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Brooke Crothers

Oct. 13, 2011 11:25 p.m. PT

2 min read

Amazon could be on track to ship as many as 5 million Kindle Fire tablets in the fourth quarter, according to an analyst who tracks the market.

"Checks indicate that they could ship upwards of 5 million units in the December quarter [fourth quarter], which is just shy of half of Apple's volume," said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw in a phone interview Thursday. That's an increase from Kumar's previous forecast of up to four million in the same quarter.

Why the hike in the forecast? "Because they have received record preorders," he said, echoing revised forecasts from other analysts.

"It's the first time a competitor has emerged to challenge Apple and that's literally from a standing start," he added. Apple is shipping about 12 million iPad 2 tablets a quarter, according to Kumar.

The Kindle Fire launched on September 28 at $199 and was made available for preorder immediately on the Amazon Web site.

In the first six days, preorders for the Kindle Fire were estimated at about 215,000, according to data provided by eDataSource. Other sources put this estimate even higher. Moreover, the sales pace is expected to pick up after the Kindle Fire begins to ship on November 15.

Kumar cautioned that supply constraints on the display is a factor that could keep Amazon back from hitting the revised target. "The primary gating factor is on the display side. If they can fix that...it's not demand limited. It's a supply constraint," he said.

Along these lines, Taipei-based market researcher Trendforce said Friday that display panel makers have been ramping up shipments of displays for 7-inch tablets like the Kindle Fire, demonstrating "superb...tablet panel shipments in September," according to analyst Jian-An Chen.

A burst of 7-inch panel production for products like the Kindle Fire as well as HTC and Asus tablets "has effectively pushed the shipment of 7 (inch) tablet PC panel in September to 1.82 million units with MoM growth of 195%," Chen wrote.