E-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc.'s AMZN announced that its most affordable Fire tablet, the Fire 7, is now available in China and is priced RMB 499 ($78).
The Fire 7, launched in September initially in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Japan, France, Italy, and Spain, comes with a display of 7 inches (17 cm) diagonally, 1.3GHZ quad-core processor, rear and back cameras and 8GB of internal storage expandable up to 128GB through microSD.
It would consist of English language learning features such as Word Wise for customers who want to read or learn English. The tablet will also provide access to hundreds of thousands of Kindle books in English and Chinese.
The announcement follows its strategic partnership with Chinese Internet giant Baidu Inc. BIDU to become the default search engine for the Kindle and Fire hardware platforms, effective from Thursday.
Amazon touts Fire Tablet as is its fastest selling tablet to date. Amazon said that sales of its 7-inch tablet tripled over the Thanksgiving weekend from last year, thus becoming the hottest selling electronics product this season.
Therefore, with the launch of the Fire Tablet in China, Amazon stands to earn revenues from hardware sales as well as from apps and services.
The partnership is also a positive given Baidu’s presence in China (it is touted as China’s Google GOOGL). Per China Internet Network Information Center, over 92% of Internet users in the country use Baidu for search. Google is ranked fourth with only 27% of the country’s population using it, while Bing is used by less than 2%. So making Baidu the default search engine makes sense.
In fact, Amazon also plans to incorporate the Baidu app store, Baidu Baike and fantastic art and other services into its Fire tablet computers and Kindle e-book readers. This will enable Amazon to offer its Chinese users a more local experience and thereby help the device gain traction in one of the most lucrative markets in the world.
Amazon has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). A better-ranked stock is NVIDIA Corporation NVDA sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).
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