The Math of Undertracking

[amirnetz]

ioi said:

Lol, you do realise this is my site, right?

Trust me, any disparity in shipments / sales is due to Microsoft producing and shipping a load of units in the buildup to the holidays - we do study these things

Also, whilst 450k may be the entire October sales in others if you look on the front page you see it sold 230k last week so it is more like 2 weeks sales at the moment, which really isn't a lot.

Your site - yes. But I hope you are willing to stand up to scrutany. I am a numbers junkie and will call it out whenever things don't add up for me.

Also, let's not confuse Europe with "Others". When Microsoft talks about Europe, they mean only ~75% of the VGC "Others" market.

Let's look at the whole picture. Right now you are assuming 2M units in the channel already. (25M shipped per Microsoft public statements, 23M sold per VGC). This is a bit too much. 2M units stocked in the channel so early is a bad use of storage space and capital at the retailers level and also a bad risk.

Also, independent statements from the retailers suggested a shortage of 360 in the making (see the GameStop CEO statements), casting doubt on the assessment of such a huge inventory in the channel.

So all together I believe the actual channel stoking numbers are about 500K lower than your own channel inventory assessment. That said, overall, you are really pretty close 23M is probably just 2% undertracking under for LTD. Really commendable.