Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is holding a fire sale of sorts, and it’s not for any of the items sold on the retail juggernaut’s website. Instead, the company is substantially reducing the price of its Fire Phone from $198 to just 99 cents, three months after Amazon debuted the phone on the market and ahead of Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone 6 unveiling.
Amazon announced in a statement that its flagship 32-gigabyte phone would be available for just 99 cents with a two-year contract. It also comes with a year of Amazon Prime membership and an array of cloud services. A Prime membership entails accessing Prime Instant Video and Prime Music collections, borrowing tens of thousands of books from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library and free two-day shipping on its products.
The other 64-GB Amazon Fire Phone version will also experience a significant price reduction from $300 to just $100.
“Fire is now 99 cents with a two-year contract, plus customers get one full year of Prime included,” said Ian Freed, Vice President, Amazon Devices, in a statement. “With access to all of the Prime content, Mayday, 32GB of memory and free unlimited cloud storage for photos, plus the exclusive Dynamic Perspective and Firefly features, Fire is another example of the value Amazon delivers to customers.”
Business analysts contend that Amazon’s unprecedented move could signify that the company isn’t hitting its sales targets for the smartphone. ZDNet opines that it’s a “get people in the ecosystem as fast as possible – and at any cost.” Tech experts argue that the phone is fine but it’s not superior to the wide range of other smartphones currently offered on the market, plus it’s only exclusively available on AT&T’s network.
The data indicates that Amazon was only able to garner fewer than 35,000 sales of the Fire Phone within the first 20 days of its launch.
The Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Fire Phone consists of a 4.5-inch HD screen, two cameras – a 2.1-megapixel front-facing camera and a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera that comes with features like optical image stabilization and high dynamic range – and is powered by the Snapdragon 800 processor.
Amazon clearly has concerns that the release of the Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone 6 will impact sales hence their “Fire-Sale”.