A woman holds a Google Nexus 7 tablet computer equipped with a 7-inch LCD display and a quad-core Tegra processor in its 340g body in Tokyo. (AFP photo/Yoshikazu Tsuno)
Released in July to universal critical acclaim, the Nexus 7 was Google's first tablet and until now, there have
been no official figures as to how well it has performed in relation to its competitors.
But according to an interview published October 30 in the Wall Street Journal following the company's third quarter earnings call, chief financial officer David Chang said about the tablet that: "At the beginning, it was, for instance, 500k units a month, then maybe 600, 700k. This latest month it has been close to 1 million."
Initially available in the US and western Europe, the Nexus 7 tablet has since been rolled out to a number of other territories, most notably Japan and South Korea in September -- two markets with a huge demand for smaller tablets -- and this increased demand may be one reason for the tablet reaching 1 million sales a month.
Like its closest rival, Amazon, Google is believed to sell each device at cost or at a small loss with the intention of making a profit on content, web-based advertising and charging for cloud storage.
If the figures given by Chang are accurate, the Nexus 7 has sold roughly 3-4 million units since launch which, while impressive, is nowhere near Apple's total of 100 million iPads over the last two years and 14 million tablets in the last financial quarter of 2012. However, Google's sales figures are expected to spike in the run-up to Christmas as its new, larger capacity 7-inch tablet hits the shelves and is joined by the Nexus 10, its big brother, boasting the highest resolution screen of any tablet device currently in production.