Less than 50,000 units may have been sold in several months

Oct 24, 2014 13:07 GMT  ·  By

Rumors about Amazon’s mythical smartphone suddenly became accurate when the company introduced its first ever mobile phone. Dubbed after its Fire lineup of products, the smartphone was stuffed with Amazon’s services and apps, but did not really stand out from other devices in the same price range.

Aside from its 3D interface, there was nothing that would make millions of people want to buy the Amazon Fire Phone, which was obvious only a few days after its release.

As a matter of fact, comScore did a survey and reported that only 35,000 customers in the US have been making use of the Amazon Fire Phone several months after the smartphone’s launch at AT&T carrier.

And things got even worse and Amazon was forced to drop the Fire Phone’s contract price from $200 (€158) to $0. Even so, it looks like, for whatever reason, no one actually wants to buy Amazon’s Fire Phone.

The confirmation came earlier today after Amazon announced its Q3 2014 earnings, showing the biggest loss in its history, $544 million (€430 million).

Soon after the announcement, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos held a conference call and confirmed that his company was also taking a $170 million (€135 million) write-down related to unsold Amazon Fire Phone inventory and supplier commitments.

Unsurprisingly, no one wants to buy the Amazon Fire Phone

Even though this looks like a huge loss on paper, it’s not in any way surprising for those who followed the news about Amazon Fire Phone.

It will be interesting to see how Amazon will get rid of the huge Fire Phone stock in the next months, though the recent international launch of the smartphone might help a bit as well.

The thing is Amazon’s CEO is still optimistic and hopes his company will have a great holiday season sale this year. Here is what he had to say during the conference call:

“As we get ready for this upcoming holiday season, we are focused on making the customer experience easier and more stress-free than ever.

“In addition to our already low prices, we will offer more than 15,000 Lightning Deals with early access to select deals for Prime members, hundreds of millions of products across dozens of categories, curated gift lists like Holiday Toy List and Electronics Holiday Gift Guide, new features like #AmazonWishList, and a great new lineup of products like Kindle Voyage and Fire HD Kids Edition.

“And if you order your gifts on AmazonSmile, we'll donate a percentage of your purchase price to your favorite charity,” said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

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