Early this morning, Dutch market research outfit Newzoo released a very interesting press announcement.

Its focus was a result of a user survey the company had carried out, through which it predicted there were 17.4 million active Kindle Fire users in the US.

This was interesting as Amazon doesn't provide figures about how many units it ships of any of its Kindle hardware.

Newzoo's conclusion - highly likely - from this number was that there were over 10 million Kindle Fires in the US.

"We found it impressive to know that Kindle Fire continues to sell at the pace of the Xmas season and its launch," Newzoo CEO Peter Warman told PocketGamer.biz.

Rivals, equals?

More controversial perhaps was the company's research that there were 30.5 million active iPad users in the US.

Compared to the Kindle Fire user rate, this suggested that the ratio of active users to each device was 1:1.75 in terms of Kindle Fire:iPad.

This seems high, given Kindle Fire has only been available for seven months, while iPad has been available, and selling fast, for 2 years.

Anyhow, based on this information, PocketGamer.biz said that this research suggested there were only 17.5 million iPads in the US; clearly a massive underestimate given over 55 million iPads have been sold globally.

Apples and pears

As Peter Warman pointed out, though, our calculation assumed Amazon had sold exactly 10 million Kindle Fires and that both the Kindle Fire and iPad active user to device ratio (1:1.74) was the same. (That calculation is based on 10 million Kindle Fires and those 17.4 million active users.)

"We, at this moment, do not have the ratio as we have for consoles," he said, when asked if the company had any information on whether Kindle Fire and iPad usage was the same.

More importantly, he stated the user to device ratio for Kindle Fire likely isn't 1:1.74.

"17.4 million active users is our concrete fact," he explained. "The 10 million sold units is an absolute minimum. But it could be 10 million, it could be 16 million."

Speculative mathematics

Obviously, the higher Kindle Fire's install base, the lower the user to device ratio and so the higher the number of iPads in the US (assuming usage patterns are the same for both devices).

For example, if there were 16 million Kindle Fires in the US and Newzoo says there's 17.4 million active users, the ratio would be 17.4/16 = 1.0875.

Newzoo also says there are 30.5 million active iPad users in the US, so this would give us an install base of 28 million, or around 50 percent of the global total of 55 million.

In this way, Newzoo's numbers assume that the Kindle Fire install base is much higher than 10 million. More like 16 million, in fact. 

A final, minor, point was that in its original press release, Newzoo said there were 3.7 million active Kindle Fire users in the UK. Obviously, it meant Kindle users; something that's since been corrected.

[source: Newzoo]