Playstation 4 has sold-through 30.2 million units worldwide

[binary solo]

drkohler said:

ZhugeEX said:

There is a difference between sold through and sold in. 

Sony report both. They have sold in 29.3 million as of September 30th 2015 as they mentioned in their earnings release.

This 30.2 milion is a sold through number as of November 22nd and includes consoles sold at retail to end users. 

There is a bit of a weird thing going on here.

They reported 29.3M "shipped" in their earnings release - or did they report 29.3M sell-in? (Usually companies always reported shipped=manufactured numbers unitl now).

If the 29.3M number was indeed shipped, then there is NO WAY Sony could have sold through 30.2M units by November 22nd. If that were true, then ALL the consoles on ships trundling to their destinations had been moved to retailers. In addition, 900k units of the new quarter shipment (which weren't on ships until November) would also have had to arrive in shops before Nov 22nd and hd to be sold. As it usually takes around 8 weeks to ship "stuff", that would mean all consoles were/are now air transported which I find kind of very unlikely.

If I wanted to "believe" the 30.2M number, this would mean Sony manufactured WAY more than 29.3M units by end of last quarter. And hid the real number in the inventory column of the earnings report (that column does show a remarkable increase). Why they would do that - maybe to piss off MS with exactly such a depressing statement?

Or maybe that 30.2M sell-through is an estimate by Sony using a few known numbers like MediaCreate for Japan, NPD for USA and some Eurotracked countries and then linearly exrapolated all over the globe, assuming sales patterns were equal everywhere untracked.

Sony can only count a console as sold when a purchase order from a retailer has been made. So yeah, given Sony would have planned for the $50 price cut well before October hit, they would have ramped up manufacturing and distribution before the end of September but none of those units could be reported as sold at the end of the September quarter. And if you think Sony can't ship a couple of million PS4's over the space of almost 2 months you must have not been paying attention to December quarter shipment information over the last few generations. When the demand is there all these companies can ship large numbers of consoles over a period of several weeks. 

reporting a number like 30 million sell through in 2 years is the sort of news that can influence Sony's share price. If Sony lied about information like that they would be in huge trouble with the financial markets regulators for misleading the market. That's a dangerous game for Sony to play, especially since they are leading the market by a huge margin anyway there is really no need for Sony to put ouot false information about reaching 30 million sell through. Especially given if 30 million wasn't reached at the 2 year mark it would be reached for sure before the end of the year and that would be just as much of a good news story. Sony has very little motive to lie and announce 30 million before PS4 actually reaches that mark, and plenty of legal motiviation not to lie.