| BKK2 said: wiifm, How are the figures in that link twisted? Those are what Sony has sold to retailers, they can't just make up numbers in a financial earnings statement, that would be illegal. |
They came pretty close in Q1 of FY08. At the end of FY07, Sony claimed 5.5 million PS3's "shipped", defining "shipped" as "produced and put in warehouses." And they claimed 3.6 million units sold, defining sold as "shipped to retailers", which is a fairly common practice. However, it was clearly misleading as investors though they meant "shipped" as in "shipped to retailers" and sold as in "sold to customers." It was then that they announced they'd ship 11 million PS3s in FY08.
At Q1 of FY08, Sony redefined "shipped" as "shipped to retailers" which is the standard method of counting. Despite a significant change in their numbers because of this, they left their FY07 numbers using the old method. The difference between the old and new method of counting was 1.9 million units. Effectively, they decreased their end-of-FY08 LTD projections from 16.5 million units to 14.6 million units without saying it in those terms.
You can easily argue that they were twisting their number to mislead (and seemingly mislead a lot of reporters successfully). The advantage for Sony is that they've got reporters out there missing the ball on the 1.9 million units they didn't actually ship, so they're overreporting Sony's numbers for them.
As was pointed out, it's doubly ridiculous for Sony to claim "record" PS3 sales its first holiday season on the market, since *any* holiday sales would be "record" holiday sales.
Being extremely generous, let's say Sony "shipped" 10 million total units. Minus the 5.5 million units they shipped in FY07 and plus the 1.9 million units they redefined as "not yet shipped" by changing their counting methods, they still have 4.6 million units to ship in a quarter that's traditionally very slow.
