Amazon.com (AMZN) Has Tough Time Selling Fire Phone

Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) may have been a little bit ambitious with its Fire smartphone, according to speculation surrounding the latest sales metrics of the device.

The U.K.'s Guardian news source did a little math to estimate just how many of the cutting-edge handsets were sold since debuting last July. The report looked at traffic numbers from Chitika, the Fire Phone's activity was just 0.015 percent of all activity roughly 20 days following its release.

The Guardian then cited comScore data, showing that U.S. smartphone growth was about 1 to 2 million units or 175 to 177 million units in use for the three month period ending July 2014. That gives total Fire Phones in use through mid-August at 26,250 to 26,550 units.

There is some 'under-indexing' at Chitika, which gauges on how much time users spend online. The Guardian explains: ...imagine there are 100 owners of device A, and 100 owners of device B, and 100 of device C. If owners of A and C use their devices online an equal amount of time, but device B owners spend only half their time online, a system that measures web impressions will report that there are half as many owners of device B. One would say that device B “under-indexes”. Alternatively, if you have equal numbers of A, B and C, but device A owners spend twice as much time online as B or C, then device A “over-indexes”.

After adjusting for that number, you end up with something just over 35,000 Fire Phones in use after the first 20 days of availability.

Shares of Amazon are up 1.5 percent Tuesday.

You May Also Be Interested In

• Amazon Prime Day could drive $21.6 billion in sales, boost Alexa adoption
• Pay attention to this full-stack AI infra provider, says Morgan Stanley
• Multiple AI opportunities will drive revenue growth for this name: BofA