Oh come on. do you really believe that? Shipped = sold or what? And retailers always perfectly estimate demand, right?

Well, the numbers in the article are unit sales and are till June 08. They were posted here a few months ago btw. Those 136.32 is just from adding the two quarters. The 138.15 production shipment figure is from someone on GAF. Those are legit numbers.

If I remember right the figure Sony was giving for the PS2 before was shipment to warehouse, not to retailer. Which mean it accounted for replacement unit and other that wasn't necessary sold to retail.

Not saying that the number here are spot on just pointing out that the number you give as production shipment vs unit sales(which I take you mean as shipped to retailer) is too close to one another. That or the PS2 was the most reliable machine ever or Sony just didn't replace the broken unit.

I thought we agreed in that old thread that those 131.3m were normal shipments, because production shipments were over 133m at that time. And I doubt that the difference is more than 2 million now, because the PS2 isn't produced as much anymore. I don't think that there are 4 million systems sitting there , when they maybe produce 500k a month.

To further prove my point: The number from the PS3 is unit shipments. Why would they mix two different methods in one statement? Doesn't make sense.

I wasn't in that thread because if that was the case I wouldn't have agree. A difference of only 2 million between the production number and the sold to retailer number on a piece of electronic hardware that sold over 100 million unit is much too low. Again, the PS2 either had a really low failure rate or Sony didn't replace unit that were broken during the warranty.

They have to produce those replacement unit you know...

Err, production shipments have nothing to do with replacements. It's the amount of consoles shipped from the factories to Sonys own warehouses. BKK2 agrees with me too btw.

Correct me if I'm wrong but:

When a company, any company, is producing a product - Nintendo, MS, Sony - they have to work with manufacturers well in advance of when the product is actually being built, and sold. This is to ensure all parts needed for the system (in the case of the PS3, there are ~2,800 components) are in stock so the actual console can be built.

Because of this, there is a very large lead time on parts orders, to ensure proper ramp-up of production in the Holiday months.

So if Sony mis-calculated PS3 demand...Guess what? That means there's a larger gap. When the parts were ordered, I'd tend to think that:

1) The PS3 was selling very well, and had a massive YoY increase vs. last year
2) The economic recession wasn't nearly as prevelant as it was in Q2-3 vs. Q4.

So I must ask: Given the lead time on console manufacturing, what incentive would Sony of had to underestimate demand?

Likewise, the same problem rings true for electronics distributors. They knew the PS3 was selling much better than last year, and they had to place their orders in advance too (the distributors, not the individual retail outlets)...They follow the 2-point argument as well.

Manufacturing and sales don't happen in a bubble. Here's a great article from TGDaily concerning the manufacturing of Lite-On DVD drives for the Xbox 360:

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38888/139/

Looking at the article, it was made in August, and projecting shipments of 5 million DVD drives for X360's during the holiday quarter. This would mean to me that they had a good idea what MS was wanting, and had to prepare to produce the drives - 3 months before the holidays actually hit.

That 138.15 number seems to come from combining the production shipments until March 2007 with the shipments to retail for fiscal year 2008 and beyond. I don't think I have to give an additional explanation why you can't just add those 2 numbers together.

Well then, the production shipments are even higher, probably over 140m. But the 136.32m number is unit sales, because the 131.3m from June 08 can't possibly be production shipments as they should be well over 135m at that point.

You are right. All producers of goods have to guess the demand for their product about three to six months in the future. Sony had to guess the demand at a time before the Xbox 360 got the price cut and all had to guess the demand before the crisis really emerged. I would say many electronic goods were overstocked this year by a certain margin.

So I don't really see why so many people think that bigger differences between shipped and sold volumes are so funny, at least this year. Everybody expected a normal year. Normally such goods are delivered by ship so you have to expect shipping times of more than a month. You need your goods in the shops at least one month before christmas...

I think many producers got a slight feeling of doom, when they looked at their preorder numbers and the news.