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killer7 on 05 February 2025
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Tober said:
Doctor_MG said:

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. 

I Agree and would add it's important to understand the word 'Shipment' can be defined differently given the context on how and when it's reported. What I mean is the difference between using 'Shipment' in an Operational Report vs. a Financial one.

According to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), when reporting Shipments in a financial reports, these are ONLY there to support the accounting line item REVENUE and COST OF GOODS SOLD (GOGS). If a shipment of units occurred that did not lead to an impact to these line items, the shipment should not be reported in said Financial Report. Let me give some examples where a shipment would physically take place in an operational sense, but not in a financial sense:

A) Give a Playstation for free to game journalist or influencers. These physically are produced and shipped, but not lead to REVENUE/COGS, instead are accounted as MARKETING EXPENSE, therefore these units will not show up on financial shipment reports.

B) Demo's. These are still owned by Sony, and will be accounted on the balance sheet, not as REVENUE/COGS, therefore should not be counted as shipped in a financial report.

C) Consignment Stock, this is where a retailer and Sony has an agreement where the stock at the retailer is still Sony's property, until the unit actually gets sold to an end consumer. As long as it's in consignment stock it will not be counted as shipped in a financial report.

Therefore its tricky to try to align different reports when those reports had a different purpose. If Sony is making a statement in an operational sense how many are produced or shipped (two different things offcourse), then it's not unusual at all if that does not 100% match with a statement of shipments in a financial report. This is offcourse true for Nintendo or Xbox as well.

And thats the point: Every console ever produced (demo station, dev kit, presents to journalists and also repaired PS2) cout towards the 160.6 million). Dev Kits are not sold to costumers, demo stations sure as hell not for reasons i explained multiple times. Presents to journalists, ok maybe i can see this but repaired PS2s reshipped have to be subtracted from these 160.6 million. So far less than 160.6 milllion PS2s have been shipped.

Last edited by killer7 - on 09 February 2025