Ok, one more before I head out of work.    From what I can see this is the Sony section of the site.  Am I correct there?  However all I read in the threads here whenever there is something positive to say about the PS3, it's discredited and said to be false by many people who have something with "wii" in their sig.  Then they put on their blinders and sing "lalalalala" and try to block out any good news that Sony may have.

 What's polite is that I don't go to the nintendo section of the forums here and post there talking down about that system.  Nintendo doesn't interest me at all so I don't even bother with it.   Eventually all this negativity on this site when it comes to ANY good news for Sony gets built up and a person may snap.  So for that, I do apologize.   So, since it will be a while before I read this thread again, can someone explain to me how NPD numbers that guesstimate Wal-mart and some other retailers numbers is more accurate then the manufacturer?

jjseth - No offense intended, but you're being obtuse about this issue, and attacking the site has just caused everyone else to come attack you instead - that's trolling.

Sony made some 6.6 million PS3s, sold some 4.3 million of those to retailers, who in turn sold some 3.6 million of those to customers.

If you really dig into the report you'll see a high cost for what they call "inventory", which basically amounts to boatloads of PS3's sitting around that they made but the retailers won't yet buy. Which is leftovers from them producing more PS3's than would sell in order to get close to the "6 million shipped" goal for the end of last March that they set for themselves.

So to recap, as of the end of June, about 3.6 million people had a PS3 in their homes, about 700,000 PS3's were sitting on store shelves around the world (a healthy but not too high stock level) and about 2.3 million PS3's are sitting in Sony warehouses waiting to move because they overproduced to meet shipment goals last financial year.

People have said the same thing in all shapes and forms, haven't you read it yet? I'm going to explain it in Portuguese to see if it helps:

Os números da Sony são as vendas DELES às LOJAS. Os números do vgchartz são uma estimativa das vendas das lojas aos clientes.

Hope that helps!

I don't see anyone claiming that VGC is more accurate than anyone else. NOBODY has made that claim. Is it really that hard to understand, VGC, NPD, etc are reporting DIFFERENT BENCHMARKS than Sony is.

Okay, first of all, this is a site about sales numbers. Just because it's the Sony forums doesn't mean that numbers should be falsely analyzed.

Second, no one is contradicting Sony's numbers, you are simply mis-interpreting them. It's as simple as that. No company will EVER tell you how many of their systems they sold to consumer households. This section of sales data has no effect on their finances, and they have no more ways to accurately track these sales than VGC or NPD. This site is tracking THOSE SALES, Sony is tracking sales they have made directly, not the sales from the stores. It's actually a very simple and straightforward situation, but you don't seem to be willing to accept it simply because it means Sony hasn't sold as much as you want them to.

It isn't that it's more accurate, it's reporting a different statistic. It's a financial report, and financially speaking Sony sells their PS3's to retailers, and any data of sell-through to consumers doesn't really belong there because it doesn't (directly) affect their bottom line. Very occassionally you'll see one of the big three issue a press release with real sell-through numbers in it, usually when they hit a milestone in some area (like 1 million PS3's sold in Europe), and that's based off their own internal tracking combined with the likes of NPD, ChartTrack, etc.

And WalMart doesn't tell Sony how many PS3's they sell any more than they do NPD, by the way.

 JJseth, sold for Sony (or any other manufacturer) is the same as selling to retailers. Sony doesn't sell their products directly to customers, do they? Now it happens to be that the Wii is selling greatly almost everywhere at the moment, so the difference to their numbers sold to retailers and the actual numbers of sold to customers is relatively small. Both PS3 and Xbox 360 don't have that luxery at the moment, so they face a larger descrepancy between the numbers of units sold and the numbers of sold to customers. Microsoft for instance declared selling 11.6M units at the end of June, which according to this site means around 1.5M of them are still sitting on shelves or are in transit to stores. So Sony having a difference of less than 1M between sold to retailers and sold to customers is really not that crazy.

About the Q3 and Q4 shifting most of the units sold so far, are you that surprised? It just means Sony sold most of it units (about 3.5M) from oktober 2006 to march 2007, which is the period which included the launches in all the major territories. Now in the next three months (April-June) they only sold 0.71M units. This makes a lot of sense if you've been following sales trends which are reported by this site as well as tracking services like NPD, Media Create and others.

One another note, I noticed this little part in their statement which seem to imply their inventory of PS3s has only increased since march 2007. This is most likely the biggest reason why there is a pricecut in the US now, they really can't keep having almost 2 billion worth of inventory lying around.

See the bottom of page 4 for the actual text (I can't copy paste it)

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/fr/07q1_sony.pdf

 This actually raises a very interesting point, because as you know, most financial analysts do considerably worse than enthusiasts, in many industries.

Now let's compare Sony staff with enthusiasts.  In principle, Sony staff should do no worse--they know everything the enthusiasts do (public knowledge) and then some (internal numbers).  Let's discuss these.

1) public knowledge: will there be a Sony employee who is getting paid to figure out from public sources how many PS3 is sold?  It's a possibility.  Or they can trust tracking agencies like NPD.  This assumed Sony employee needs to make a subjective call--models are themselves subjective.  This leads to a margin of error that defeats the purpose of this employee's position.  Back to tracking agency numbers we go then.

2) internal knowledge: how much does sony really know?  they can extrapolate end-consumer sale from retailer orders, and perhaps they can get some actual sell-through numbers from big retailers.  but that means there's also a margin of error.  my opinion is that this margin of error is likely much greater than tracking agencies--the primary argument being, if companies have accurate enough data from retailers, tracking agencies won't be in business.

so, as we can see, the manufacturer does not necessarily have a better idea than a dedicated enthusiast in actual numbers sold to the consumer.  

now, the corollary.  companies can only report HARD, SOLID numbers to investors.  thus, Sony cannot be reporting to investors sold-to-consumer numbers.

You're giving way too much credit to someone who can't understand the difference between PS3 sold to retailers and customers.

those numbers are fake.. even npd doesnt have the ps3 at that much sold.. sony is giving us sold to retailers numbers.. not actual install base.. the wii and 360 are the true next gen sellers