Amazon is taking a $170 million writedown due to poor Fire Phone sales, Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak disclosed in the company's earnings conference call for the quarter ended September 30, 2014. Szkutak mentioned that this writedown was primarily related to the evaluation of Fire phone inventory and supplier commitment costs. Of this, $25 million is from the International markets and the remaining is from the North America region. At the end of Q3 2014, Amazon has around $83 million worth of unsold Fire phone inventory. Frankly, this doesn't come as a surprise considering the mediocre looks & specifications of Fire phone combined with unimpressive $199 contract pricing in an intensely competitive smartphone market. To be fair, the phone did have interesting features like Firefly that enabled users to identify real-world items by scanning them with their Fire phone and of course purchase them from Amazon. It also offered an SDK for developers who wanted to integrate this feature into their apps. Besides this, it also had gimmicky features like Dynamic perspective display that claimed to offer immersive 3D experience to users. The company also dropped the contract pricing of Fire Phone to a mere $0.99 last month. But, even this doesn't seem to have attracted customers to opt for Fire Phone. Other operational highlights - Amazon extended its payment solution 'Pay with Amazon' to third party sellers in India. Amazon mentions that this service enables merchants to essentially outsource financial transactions to the company and focus only on sourcing and managing inventory. This service is currently live on e-commerce stores like Babyoye,…
