Disappointing demand for Fire Phone weighs down Amazon results

The Fire Phone weighs on the business results of supplier Amazon. The webshop writes off converted 134 million on the smartphone, due to payments to suppliers and ‘evaluation of the stock’. The Fire Phone came out this summer.

The Android smartphone is rumored to have to deal with disappointing sales, but people who have bought it also do not seem satisfied; Amazon’s customers give it an average of two stars. The Fire Phone, which received moderate reviews, came out in July and is only available from the American provider AT&T.

The financial setback is due to Amazon’s presumably building up inventory that it isn’t now losing and because it has made agreements with parts suppliers about guaranteed payments. Amazon won’t disclose how many Fire Phones it has sold, but it still has unsold units on the shelf worth $65 million.

In discussing its quarterly earnings, Amazon’s board declined to comment on whether the Fire Phone will cause further losses in the future. The Fire Phone is a smartphone with a fork of Android and aimed at using Amazon services such as the Amazon App Store and the web store. The phone also has a novelty in the form of the 3D effect on the screen; the phone therefore keeps track of where the user’s face is.