Sam Oliver
Sales of Google and Asustek's Nexus 7 tablet have steadily increased since its launch, and are now near 1 million units per month.
Asustek Chief Financial Officer David Chang told The Wall Street Journal that Nexus 7 sales have grown from a start of about 500,000 units in the first month. In the latest month of sales, the number was "close to 1 million."
The figures suggest that Google's low-priced tablet has been a moderate success in the tablet market, though nowhere near as popular as Apple's iPad. In its last three-month frame, Apple sold 14 million iPads, which was a 26 percent unit increase from the same quarter a year ago.
Total sales or more specific figures for the Nexus 7 have not been revealed by Asustek or Google. Amazon has also been cagey about revealing sales figures for its 7-inch Kindle Fire tablet.
The Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire face stiff competition from Apple's new 7.9-inch iPad mini, which will go on sale this Friday. The iPad mini has a starting price of $329, which places it at a premium over the $199 entry price of the Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7.
Google refreshed the Nexus 7 this week by doubling the capacity of the $199 model to 16 gigabytes. a 32-gigabyte model is also available for $249. A model with HSPA+ mobile connectivity with 32 gigabytes of memory is also available for $299.
The Nexus 7 debuted earlier this year in July with Google's Android 4.1 Jelly Bean operating system. It has been seen as an attempt by Google to counter the Kindle Fire, which runs a forked version of Android tailored by Amazon to sell products through its online store.
William Gallagher
Charles Martin
Christine McKee
113 Comments
sold products or shipped into the channels?
"Approach one million" and "close to one million"... Still not one million...
I think people get this wrong. Android tablets are comparing themselves to the ipad, but the real threat is the windows tablets.
Apple fans are going to continu to buy into Apple because Apple has an extremely high retention ratio, but the Android and Windows buyers are all the same. If windows surface takes off, Android is going to be the one suffering from it.
[quote name="mac-user" url="/t/153929/sales-of-googles-nexus-7-tablet-approach-1-million-per-month#post_2223636"]sold products or shipped into the channels?[/quote] I was thinking the same thing. Plus how many were returned. Interesting that 2.5-3 million in 3 months is of note for this device when Apple probably did that in ship to home preorders. I would love to see a device what really competes with the iPads because that has benefits for Apple but yet again this doesn't seem like it did it. Not even close
Apple appears to be selling about 4.7 million units a month and that is comparing to the Nexus 7 which is just short of a million a month (whatever that means). It still shows there is plenty of room in the tablet market.
Also shipped vs sold is a weird thing. Companies like Samsung and Asus can only count shipped product because they might do much direct to customer sales. Apple does more direct sales than channel sales, so it is an easier thing for them to report. Either way complaining about shipped vs sold doesn't get you very far.