Sony CONFIDENT sales of PS3 to top 11 million by End of this fiscal year!!

[Sullla]

As usual, there's a lot of misinformation and confusion floating around Sony's fiscal goals; let's see if we can try to clear that up. First, on the "shipped" vs. "sold" issue. Sony used to count anything they manufactured as a "sold" unit. Even if it was sitting in a Sony warehouse, it was still considered as sold. But when they released their Q2 report last year, they changed their tracking methodology. Now, only units shipped to retailers are counted as "sold"; Sony did this as a way of downgrading their PS3 sales forecast without being obvious about it. Therefore, in order to meet their current sales target of 11m PS3s in this fiscal year, Sony has to actually sell units to retailers. That puts a limit on how much channel stuffing can take place, as retailers will only accept so much extra inventory.

Looking at the statement itself:

Worldwide sales of Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 are expected to reach 11 million by the end of this fiscal year, a senior executive said in an interview published Saturday.

Sony Computer Entertainment's chief executive Kazuo Hirai told the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper he was confident of fulfilling that goal despite stiff competition from Nintendo's Wii and Microsoft's XBoX 360.

I think it's quite clear that Sony is sticking to their long-stated goal, 11m units (shipped to retailers) by the end of this fiscal year (March 2008). They are not changing over to 11m lifetime sales by the end of March, or the terminology would have been different. Of course, as we've been over this subject many times, Sony cannot possibly reach this target (it will require monthly sales after Christmas to average about 2 million each, or roughly 460k WEEKLY sales in some of the slowest sales months of the year. The PS3 doesn't even sell that well during the holidays!)

So I still have no idea what exactly Kaz is thinking when he makes statements like this. The only way that this could come true would be to bundle a PS3 with the sale of all DSs.