Amazon Sitting on $83 Million of Unsold Fire Phones
Walled garden phones? I’m bored now.
Expect a fire sale on these devices soon. (pun intended…)
Amazon’s financial results for the third financial quarter of 2014 didn’t do the company any favors when they were announced late last week; the retail giant posted a quarterly net loss of $437 million, up dramatically from last year’s 3Q loss of $41 million. The biggest single contributor to the bad news? Amazon’s Fire Phone.
We had mostly positive things to say about the Fire Phone when we reviewed it a few months back. We were especially impressed with the device’s “Firefly” feature, which quickly and (mostly) accurately recognizes things you point the phone at (and links you to the item’s Amazon product page). However, in spite of this and other bits of whiz-bang wizardry, consumer adoption of the Fire Phone has lagged behind Amazon’s production of the device, and the company is now sitting on $83 million worth of unsold Fire Phone inventory.
