Leaked Sales Numbers Suggest Amazon Kindle Fire On Track To Outsell iPad [Exclusive]

Six weeks before it officially goes on sale, Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire is shaping up to be the biggest tablet launch ever… and Cult of Android has the numbers to prove it.

A verified source within the Seattle based online retail giant has provided Cult of Android with exclusive screenshots of Amazon’s internal inventory management system Alaska (Availability Lookup and SKU Aggregator).

These leaked shoots show that orders for Amazon’s Android-based tablet are racking up at an average rate of over 2,000 units per hour, or over 50,000 per day.

In the five days since Amazon put the Kindle Fire up on their official site, over 250,000 tablets have been preordered. If this level of consumer demand for the Kindle Fire continues, Amazon will have 2.5 million preorders for the device before it officially goes on sale on November 15th.

Those numbers make the Kindle Fire’s launch likely to be the biggest tablet launch in history, beating both the iPad and iPad 2 in first month sales.

The original iPad sold 300,000 units on April 3, 2010, its first day of availability. In the first month, iPad sales amounted to over a million units. By the time the iPad 2 came around in March of this year, Apple managed to rack up an estimated 2.5 million units in first month of sales.

Right now, the Kindle Fire looks like a lock to dwarf the iPad’s launch. It also seems like it might outsell the iPad 2 if this level of consumer demand continues.

Amazon’s wild breakaway success with the Kindle Fire is even more apparent when compared to companies besides Apple. For example, Motorola only managed to sell 100,000 Xoom units in its month and a half earlier this year. In addition, Research In Motion’s long anticipated BlackBerry tablet, the PlayBook, only managed to sell an estimated 250,000 units in its first month.

Even the Kindle Fire’s closest analog, the Nook Color, only shifted roughly a million units in its first two months of sales.

Of course, a preorder is not the same as a sale, and the Kindle Fire hasn’t broken any sales records yet. It’s possible that consumers could cancel their orders en masse, or demand could level off.

Even so, according to our source, Amazon is ecstatic about the Kindle Fire’s numbers so far… and for good reason.


The Amazon internal pre-order numbers for the Kindle Touch and Kindle Touch 3G, respectively.

Cult of Android has also secured the preorder numbers for the WiFi and 3G versions of Amazon’s other upcoming touchscreen e-reader, the Kindle Touch.

Despite selling for up to $100 less, the 6-inch Kindle Touch is being outsold by the Kindle Fire at a rate of ten to one, and has only racked up about 20,000 pre-orders to date.

The numbers for the $149 Kindle Touch 3G are even worse: only a few more than 12,000 people have ordered one so far.

Amazon has been notoriously secretive about its Kindle sales numbers, and has always refused to release them. This is the first time that verified order numbers of the Kindle family of e-reading devices has been made available to the public.

The numbers indicate a very rosy future for Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet, although that future may have been secured at the expense of their traditional, monochrome e-ink readers. The outlook for competing Android tablets is even bleaker: at the high end, gadget makers will need to compete with Apple’s iPad juggernaut, and on the low end, the affordable Kindle tablet backed by Amazon’s huge online content empire. As for Apple, the iPad’s success seems unassailable… but how long will Cupertino ignore these kinds of sales numbers before they respond with a low-end “iPad mini” of their own?