Kindle Fire Price Cut Coming In ‘Brutally Competitive’ Tablet Market

A recently announced Kindle Fire price cut will drop the tablet’s price from $299 to $269, furthering an already competitive market in which the buy-in for a piece of up to the minute technology grows ever lower.

But as the Kindle Fire price cut is announced, the hot hot tablet game is being reassessed, and tech watchers are looking at whether the move is an aggressive shot across the bow at other low-priced Android tablets or a last ditch effort to boost flagging sales. (Amazon is notoriously tight-lipped about sales figures in this respect.)

News of a Kindle Fire price cut was of course well-received by one demographic — technology consumers. More competition and aggressive pricing initiatives will be met with enthusiasm for those who held off buying, and demand for the portable and casual devices seems to be only increasing.

But investors were less clearly impacted in the positive by Amazon’s move, and financial site MarketWatch indicates that “Amazon’s (AMZN -2.22%) shares dipped into the red by a fraction when the announcement crossed the wires, only to flip back into slight positive territory later.”

The site also explains that Amazon’s opaque disclosure policies regarding sales can be in the short-term somewhat difficult for the market to parse, saying to “[evaluate] Amazon’s tablet business is tricky, as the company discloses no actual sales data for the devices,” but that “Amazon had third place in terms of global tablet sales in the fourth quarter of 2012, with about 11.5% share of the market for that period.”

Amazon denies that flagging sales sparked the Kindle Fire price cut, with Kindle vice president Dave Limp confirming in a statement that the massive online retailer has “been able to increase our production volumes and decrease our costs,” saying that “whenever we are able to create cost efficiencies like this, we want to pass the savings along to our customers.”