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TheBigFatJ on 31 July 2007
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Emmitt2222 said:
ioi said:
Awesome work NJ5 and spot on.

We should do a quarterly analysis like this at each interval so people can see exactly how many units are where. Interesting that retailer units have decreased a little (they order less to sell what they have) and you are right about there being no way Sony can hit their targets which does raise legal and moral issues of exactly what can you report as a forecast? You could say 20 million, ship 5 million and just say you missed the forecast - by then most people have read the 20 million forecast and made business decisions on it.

Again, nice thread and hopefully the definitive and last one we will have on the subject.

ioi, I think from a legal standpoint what they are doing [or what they could do] is not considered illegal. I don't know much about legal matters, but as long as there is information out there that people can use to base their investments on, then Sony can't be held liable. If we at this website can put all of this together, then so can the investors if they care to.


It is illegal for companies to intentionally misrepresent things or mislead investors. If Sony knows it cannot ship that many units, or if it is positioning itself to ship many fewer units (thereby proving its numbers aren't accurate), then it may be provable that it willfully mislead investors.  Console manufacture would be a very difficult business to mask -- people can look at reports, they can look at factories, they can look at records and they can say, "look, there was obviously no way you were going to hit these numbers when you issued this release."  Sony will likely have its butt covered one way or another.

Sony, of course, is a large multinational and I'm sure they have lawyers look at everything they send out. If they sent it out, they either believe that (1) the risk is worth it or (2) they have a plausable plan for doing this and will downward revise at the appropriate time. As long as it appears as though they're being as straight forward as possible they're fine.