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I don’t know that I’d trust many figures coming out of Citibank these days, but Publishers Lunch is reporting their claim that there might be as many as 500,000 Kindles out there. Heavy grain of salt:
It’s ironic that the analysts at Citi–home of catastrophic banking losses–are still considered by Wall Street to provide the best appraisal of Kindle sales. On Tuesday analyst Mark Mahaney’s team updated their earlier guess of 380,000 Kindles sold to a new estimate of 500,000 units sold. The number may well be in the ballpark, but it’s important to keep in mind how little the Citi analysts actually know.
They admit the only "credible sources" on Kindle sales are Amazon (not talking) and component manufacturers like Hon Hai (also not talking). What they find is a disclosure in Sprint Nextel’s recent quarterly 10Q that reports "certain wholesale devices are activated on the network by our wholesale partners prior to selling the device to the end customer, which resulted in approximately 210,000 such additions being activated on our network during the third quarter 2008." Citi concludes these activations are Kindle stats, without offering further evidence.
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If that’s the case, then where are they? I commute by train daily in the U.S.’s second-biggest city and I’ve seen 1 in use over the past year (and 1 Sony E-Book Reader). I’ve seen 1 at the airport over that time span as well.
Am I completely misunderstanding how Kindle owners use the product, or are these numbers wildly off base?
I share the skepticism about the Kindle — I’ve never seen one in the wild while traveling around New York City.
Also, to keep things in perspective, Apple sold 10 MILLION iPhones in the first three quarters of 2008 alone. Even if the .5M number were true, it would simply mean that Amazon is a big fish in a very small pond.
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