KruzeS said:
Except they aren't really. Expecting to sell 11 million units (even if only to retail) for the fiscal year, when they already began with units in the channel, and had a dismal first quarter, is far more ambitious than just shipping them (as in prodution shipments). They could always pille up more units (they were already holding to 2 million, why not more?), and actually they might have to, if they already were into long term production contracts. But selling 11 million... there's a limit to how much you can force retailers to hold on to, specially after Christmas. |
You see, this is why it is so misleading. Consider the situation where they may have planned this -- "our fiscal '07 numbers are terrible and we have a lot of unsold units! How can we convince investors that it was more successful?" "well, we could talk about produced numbers but use the word 'shipped'." "But that would hurt us in the next fiscal year since we do not want to continue producing at this level if they're not selling this high." "We could address that by redefining what we consider 'shipped' to be the traditional meaning that everyone else uses..."
It certainly looks suspicous to me anyway. And on paper, it looks like they shipped 5.5 million in fiscal '07 and they're projecting shipping 11 million in fiscal '08. So a casual investor will look at that and say, "ah, looks like they're going to have shipped 16.5 million total units as of march '08. Sweet.
In reality, they're projecting they would have shipped 14.5 million total units during that time frame. And they'll likely down-revise that number at least once more.
