As Apple launchesthe iPad minion Friday, the company will, for the first time in recent memory, be entering a crowded, well-established marketplace. Both Google and Amazon have been successfully selling 7-8-inch tablets for quite some time now.
We’ll never know just how well Amazon’sKindle Fire HDis selling, as they don’t release sales figures, but we do get a glimpse of Google’sNexus 7numbers this morning. And they’re pretty good. Asus’ CFO says they’re moving almost 1 million per month…
The Wall Street Journal(viaThe Next Web) reports:
“The 7-inch tablet has created a big buzz this year with its low starting price of US$199, but both Google and Asustek have been cagey about revealing actual sales figures.
Asustek executives gave the clearest indication yet, following the company’s third-quarter earnings conference on Tuesday.
“At the beginning, it was, for instance, 500K units a month, then maybe 600, 700K. This latest month, it was close to 1 million,” Asustek Chief Financial Officer David Chang told The Wall Street Journal.”
While 1 million per month pales in comparison to Apple’s iPad numbers, it sold14 million of themlast quarter, it looks pretty good next to other competitors. RIM, for example,announced earlier this yearthat it had only sold 1M PlayBooks in its first 12 months.
But Google’s not going to rest on its laurels. Alongside other products, the Mountain View company unveileda 3G version of its Nexus 7on Monday. And it dropped the price of the 16GB Wi-Fi model of the tablet down to $199 — $130 cheaper than the iPad mini.
Apple has actually takenquite a bit of heatover the past week for pricing its smaller tablet at $329, but it hasn’t seemed to have affected sales. Though the company hasn’t released any figures yet, we do know that they sold out of allpre-order mini stockin 72 hours.
And all of this gets really get interesting when you consider that the holidays are just around the corner. Can the new iPad mini stall the Nexus 7’s sales climb? Or will consumers decide that Apple’s tablet isn’t worth the extra $100 bucks?
What do you think?
