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redspear on 25 November 2008
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amirnetz said:
ioi said:
if a company says they have shipped over 5 million that doesn't mean exactly 5 million have been shipped, could have been far more than that. Our sell through numbers are solid through Europe. I think the problem is that you take statements made by pr men too literally...

You may want to read my other posts on public statements from companies on that detail their business performance.

The short story - they cannot lie about business performance. It is illegal. When Microsoft reports that at least 2M units were shipped in EMEA between June and Nov 19th then it is the truth. If June was actually more than 5M (and therefore they sold less than 2M since) then they are creating a false representation of their business performance. This is is illegal and they could be held liable.

Companies may cherry pick the business performance numbers they are using in their PRs. But whatever they report is matching their books.

 

Yes but they can get whatever number they announce through multiple means without having to be specific. For instance this could also be 360's sitting in the warehouse with a promise of being sold...If you think that is illegal Sony used to do that all the time to inflate their numbers by a few million and it is perfectly legal. In factg PR statements are given a HUGE amount of flexibility in how they can present "facts" because essentially they are like one big ad. They can not represent false facts but they can be real "facts" dressed up to look much better.

 

We used to go through this debate all the time whenever Sony released a PR. One other trick Sony used to like to do is announce the number of PAL systems sold worldwide through SCEE. Its a business and first thing a business does is promote itself.

Also for any type of statistic like this allow around 5% margin of error up or down unless you know the sampling methods or pool size. 2 million isn't that much to be in transit or stock piled there si more to europe than the UK and it is a large land mass with many many stores and retailers to be stockpiled.