| cbarroso09 said: wait a second, you say that Sony is wasting money by renting warehouses for the accomodation of around 1million consoles? yeah, that doesn't sound good right. they need to get rid of those consoles as soon as possible, so the batch that is going to be sod on black friday was completed maybe 1 day before is shipped. You think this kind of sales are planned to maintain a steady flux of products month after month by storing units? thay need to sell it in quantities of a million maybe, but they are not going to seat over 2 million on warehouse to get rid of 1 million first, then the next month sell the other million. that is lost money renting the space on the warehouse. the production of this kind of products start slow because nobody know what is going to be the real demand, how much are sold the first day. then they start buidlig a process where the increments are small until a quantity is remained in stores. after that there is no more increase in manual labor to increase manufacturing. |
Manufacturing doesn't work like that, you can't have a factory capable of building, say, 1 millions units per week (to meet launch / Christmas demand) but then only utilize 30-40% of that the rest of the year. You build consoles at a steady rate, typically above normal sales, and stockpile units to be sold during heavy-hitting periods.
"Oh shit, GTA is out next week! Best hire 500 more guys for the week and get all these machines dusted so can pump out all these extra consoles!"
Manufacturing equipment is ridiculously expensive. A simple drill for a printed-circuit-board line can cost more than your house (source: me. My father owns a PCB printing firm). It's not good business sense to have a load of machines in-house that you can only use when demand is super-high.
