| Puppyroach said: What? Your argument makes no sense at all. Yes, they hade shipped 29.3M to their warehouses at the end of the last quarter. But shipments are not sent in bulks of several millions at the end of a quarter, they are made consistently throughout a quarter. So they have of course sent several more shipments since the last report, likely a few million units. |
Here's the problem laid out for those who don't seem to see a problem.
Lets's assume that the 29.M number reported still means by September 30, 29.3M units were manufactured. By that time, manufacturing had reached its maximum level going into the XMas period. (This is the time Taiwanese students/Chinese kids gets shipped to plants to gain "industry experience"). That translates to roughly 750k units per week manufactured. That level would be kept the weeks following September 30th.(There is a fixed lower and upper limit of units any assembly plant can manufacture. A number was given last year for a specific plant. And No, assembly plants do not allow you to use their space for "warehouse purposes" (and no sane producers would have left their stuff lying around a chinese plant for obvious reasons. So the moment the units are made, they are packed into containers and leave the plant. In order words: the units are in shipping status. Obviously, they do not need to be on a very ship to be in shipping state, they just are "on their way". They are also not necessarily (all) sold at that time.
Now take the first week of October manufacturing, that would be units 29.300001 to 30.050000 coming off the assembly plants. These units were picked up at the plants, sent to a Chinese harbour, loaded on a ship, shipped to basically the two main destination harbours (west coast, USA or Holland, Europe), unloaded into a cargo container area, picked up by transporters into customer warehouses, delivered to shops.
Now let's assume these units were shipped to Europe. You can easily check the major freight companies like Maerks to see how long it takes for their ships to get from China to Holland. It is around 56 days or eight weeks. So when will our 750k units made in October 1-7 arrive? Simply add 56 days (if we asume ureasonably fast transport times) and you see these units do not even arrive before November 22nd in Europe, when supposedly 30.2M units were sold through globally. Assuming the 750k units were all shipped to western UA, that takes only around 42 days so they would arrive sometime in the second week of November.
That could actually bring the number of sold through units to just around 30M (if we assumed these 750k sold in about 10 days). It would also leave Europe without supplies for a week (despite that supply has been plentiful in Europe all over the fall season). Still short of 30.2M million units sold through by Nov 22nd, though, with almost empty shelves everywhere.
On way out of the calculus dilemma is to air freight consoles or use air freight for a part of the production. That would take off almost a month of shipping time. In order to find out, we would have had to check the manufacturing labels of the PS4s sold after Nov 1st.
I actually did check some labels here and none of the units were manufactured after Spetember 30th (and there are hundreds of old 1G units and Destiny/MGS bundles clogging shop spaces here. Maybe that is just bad luck of sample size or location (checked only around 30 palets in the region). So I simply have a logistics problem aligning the 29.3M shipped and 30.2M sold through numbers. Maybe I'm the inly one who sees a problem here.
