If Your Analyst Gig Doesn’t Work Out, There’s Probably a Job for You in Amazon PR
by John Paczkowski
Posted on August 12, 2008 at 10:42 AM PT
Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader may not be the iPod of the book world yet. But it will be some day if Citigroup research analyst Mark Mahaney has anything to say about it. In a report to clients Monday, Mahaney, who in May predicted the device would generate $750 million for Amazon by 2010, said the company could be on track to sell as many as 380,000 Kindles this year.
380,000 Kindles sold. That’s double Mahaney’s May prediction. And it’s an important number historically. “In its first year, that’s exactly how many iPods were sold,” Mahaney wrote. “Turns out the Kindle is becoming the iPod of the book world.”
But is it really? And on what sort of data is that pronouncement based? Amazon (AMZN) itself has disclosed no actual sales data for the Kindle. The company said only that the selection of titles available for the device has jumped 67 percent since its launch. Surely it’s impossible to extrapolate sales of 380,000 from that figure alone. So on what other data is Mahaney relying here? Just this, apparently:
- An anonymous source recently told TechCrunch that Amazon has shipped 240,000 Kindles. That’s shipped, not sold.
- Kindle tops Amazon’s Bestsellers in Electronics list
- Kindle has more than 4,000 customer reviews, quite a few of them positive.
Not exactly an abundance of hard data, is it? Which is not to say that the Kindle isn’t well on its way to becoming the iPod of the book world, just that we won’t know for certain until Amazon tells us with hard sales figures.
Comments
From three weeks ago: A “real” Kindle data point from a “real” source, that suggests less than, um, robust Kindle sales:
“New York Times Co. executives said today during the company’s second-quarter earnings call that the newspaper has sold a “small amount” of subscriptions on the Kindle.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/.....refer=home
As a note, yesterday TechCrunch corrected their earlier report that stated Amazon had sold 240,000 Kindles.
TechCrunch is now backpedaling that report to state that Amazon has received 240,000 Kindles into inventory.
Units accepted into inventory, verses units sold to customers.
Two far different things, indeed, even though Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney used this thin data point to take his unit forecasts into the year 2010.
Which took the stock up near 10%
WTF?
Posted by Tom Marhoefer at August 12th, 2008 at 10:25 am