Sony increasing the price of the PS5 in selected markets

[Bofferbrauer2]

SvennoJ said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

That's not really comparable.

Intel's margins crashed down over the years since the release of Ryzen, as they had to make increasingly large chips to be able to compete with AMD. Larger chips => less chips per Wafer => less margin at the same price point. For instance, Kaby Lake (the first competitor to Ryzen) was 125 mm², but Alder Lake is with 215 mm² almost twice as large, which means less than half as many chips per wafer, and Raptor Lake will be ~260mm².

Intel Shareholders are wary because of both the last quarterly report (which was pretty bad) and Intel's fab-building plans (which will cost tens of billions). Raising the prices is mostly just to keep those happy, otherwise the EPS (earnings per share) would collapse and and with them, the market value of Intel proper.

I'll take your word for it, however aren't the PS5 and Series X chips not also pretty large? Hence the Series S sitting in a comfortable (available) position?

Anyway with inflation reaching double digits, I doubt prices will go down. The outlier is the US dollar which gained a lot of value compared to all other currencies. $500 last year is worth $642 today for Sony (converted to Yen, comparing Sept 5 2021 to today). Sony could lower the price in the USA as that increase is over double the worst inflation rate today. Yet people are already pissed the USA didn't get a price hike.

We got a 4% price raise in Canada for the ps5, while the CAD is also worth a lot more today vs the Yen. Not as much as the USA but still 500 CAD a year ago is worth 609 CAD today for Japan.

USA increased 28.4%, no price raise.
Canada increased 21.8%, 4% price raise bringing the price at the same level as the US price.

Components, overseas manufacturing, shipping likely all got more expensive for Sony since the Yen is not doing very well. The Chinese Yuan also increased 19.2% in value vs the Yen. So all that manufacturing in China got more expensive for Sony (while less expensive for MS)

Oberon (PS5) is 308mm2

Anaconda (XSX) is 360mm2

Lockhart (XSS) is 197mm2

During the  chip crunch, it made perfectly sense to prioritize the production of Lockhart, since Microsoft could get many more chips per wafer, hence more consoles to sell. But the chip crunch is ending fast, and production of the bigger chips got raised significantly now that there is the needed free production space at TSMC for them.

You can already see it when you check the sales of the PS5 and XSX, with the XS outselling last year while the PS5 has catched up again to last year's sales, and both certainly keeping an increasingly large stock at hand for Black Friday and the holiday season in general. Sony also gave a sign to this when they didn't lower their sales expectation for the current financial year, meaning they're expecting the sales to go up from here despite the price increase.

The only point which is really directly hit by the inflation is the shipping. And while this increases the costs, it shouldn't nearly be enough to warrant a 50€ price hike. I was expecting that due to the chip crunch and inflation price cuts would take a long while this gen, but a price increase should never have been on the table in the first place, as there's no real reason for one.