| Tober said: 2) By serial number. A refurbished unit would have the original serial number. Possibly not all parts, like those perhaps that got replaced, but the overall serial number would remain the same to track the history of the unit. |
Right, and even though that unit was returned they can still count it as a sale.
Like this:
Customer buys product, counts as sale
Customer states product is defective and returns unit
Customer is given a replacement unit to maintain the sale.
Sony fixes the defective unit and that unit is sold, counts as a sale.
They aren't double dipping, they are two different PS2's that count as two different sales, but because they are fixing a defective unit they aren't producing another unit. Since Sony was fixing PS2's until 2018, this might be why the shipped number (160M) and the produced number (160.6M) is so close. The suggestion that, because of defective units, demo units, etc there has to be 10-15% more produced units than shipped units is a non-sequitur. There are ways to interpret the data which minimizes that percent significantly.
There could be other explanations too, and that's all I'm providing. Possible explanations as to why shipped and produced numbers would be so close.
