Time to Stoke Those Kindle Fire Sales Estimates

Last month, Amazon sent out a vague press release that indicated that its Kindle Fire was selling very, very well. Anthony DiClemente is taking the company’s suggestion seriously.

The Barclays analyst has bumped up his sales estimates for the low-end tablet: He now thinks Jeff Bezos sold 5.5 million units last quarter, up from his earlier guess of 4.5 million.

DiClemente figures Amazon will now sell 18.4 million Kindle Fires this year, which would give it nearly half of the non-iPad tablet market.

It’s always important to remember that, unlike Apple, which sells media and apps via iTunes to help support its devices sales, Amazon is approaching this from the opposite direction: It wants people to buy its devices so they’ll be more likely to buy other stuff.

DiClemente takes a stab at this one, too: He figures that by 2014, the Kindle Fire and its descendants will be generating an additional $3.9 billion a year from incremental e-commerce spending, driven by customers who pick up the company’s Prime shipping program along with their tablet.

And he thinks that, during that same year, revenue from tablet content will eclipse tablet revenue, period: He figures devices will generate $3.9 billion, and content will be worth some $5.2 billion.

Back to present tense: Has anyone seen a Kindle Fire in the wild? I haven’t, and my thoroughly unscientific spot check of my pals and peers hasn’t turned one up, either. Of course, I also recall when seeing a Kindle e-reader on the subway — many months after the e-reader’s launch — was enough to warrant a blog post.