DonFerrari said:
I would even accept being on sony warehouse waiting shipment or in the boat as long as it is already sold to retailer. If not it would be a spin |
There is no spin involved. Although in the past, there have been cases where a company reported massive "shipping numbers", but later, after the company had imploded. it was found out they only bloated numbers for the investors and their stuff was mostly unsold.
The term "shipped" has changed over time. In the old times, it really meant what the verb says. For a time, Marc Twain aka Samuel Clemens was a steamboat captain that shipped stuff up and down the Mississipi. In the old times, everything was shipped, as rivers were the only economical ways to transport stuff (and people) over longer distances. Nowadays we have road trucks and planes and trains, but the expression "shipped" has stayed and while technically it only means something went out of the factory and is on its way to wherever, it has become an expression of saying "sold".
A fq report is not written at the last day of the period, so obviously not everything that was in the fq plan was even manufactured by then. Looking at the 4M number of the PS4, and knowing that it takes roughly 8 weeks (or two-thirds of an entire fq period) for shipping (in the physical sense), we see that very roughly half of the 4M PS4s were still on ships somewhere on the oceans. The art of selling could be defined to have everything sold when the ships arrive - and therefore no need to store the stuff into a warehouse which only costs shittons of money.
So to sum up again: When the fq report was compiled, Sony had 4M units in the manufacturing plan and those 4M units would have been produced until the end of the fq, that much is certain. Many (probably half of them) were in transit on ships or "shipped". We cannot really know how many of those units in transit were already sold (at the time the fq report was compiled). A hint is looking at the value of the inventory. If that value shows a spike in the fq report, then we can conclude that "stuff" was manufactured but not sold - and the inventory value in the PS section does show a remarkable spike.
Of course all this is a bit of "hairsplitting" because those 4M units mentioned in the fq report have rapidly been sold in the meantime due to the price reductions in many regions. So "shipped" actually equals sold by now. It would instantly be clear if for comparison we had the inventory value for today (but then again, this value would be obfuscated by the now massive overproduction for the holiday season).
