In a press release Tuesday morning, Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) reported that sales of its Fire TV stick rose six times and sales of all the company’s electronics devices rose three times for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. The announcement uses the word “best” six times, one with “ever,” as in, “this holiday shopping weekend was the best ever for Amazon devices.”
Another “best” were sales of the company’s Echo voice-controlled Bluetooth speaker: “Echo was the #1 best seller across all $100+ products available on … Black Friday.” That “best” was actually said twice. Amazon sold the $180 device for $150 for the four-day weekend and on Cyber Monday.
Amazon’s senior vice-president for devices said:
We’re excited that millions of customers will be opening new Amazon devices this holiday season. This has already been the biggest holiday shopping season for Amazon devices, and we’re energized by the year over year growth for all of our product categories. With a sub-$50 price point for one or $250 for a six-pack, we’ve reached a tipping point with Fire—it is our fastest-selling tablet ever. We’ve already built millions—and we’re ramping up production to build millions more.
The company said the $50 Fire tablet is the “fastest-selling Amazon tablet ever” and that sales for the holiday weekend tripled year-over-year.
The Fire TV stick posted sales up six times compared with last year, and Amazon noted that in the period between July and October, “Fire TV has been the #1 streaming media player in the US, across all retailers.” Exactly what that may mean is a little cloudy.
In a report Monday in Multichannel News, research firm Strategy Analytics said that the Chromecast from Google led the streaming device market in the third quarter of 2015 with a share of 35%, compared with 20% for Apple TV and 16% for Fire TV and Roku. The firm said 9.2 million total units were shipped during the quarter.
Regardless of the marketing-speak in Amazon’s announcement, it is pretty hard to find anything really negative about the company’s weekend sales. The only question is whether Amazon actually made any profit from all those sales.
The stock traded up about 0.6% Tuesday morning, at $668.61 in a 52-week range of $285.25 to $682.77. The consensus price target is $726.82 and the high target is $800.00.
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