Even the man himself now doubts this bullish projection:

We haven't made any conclusion whether we have to give it up,'' Hirai said, referring to this fiscal year's 11 million shipment target. ``It depends on how aggressively dealers buy our PS3 inventory.''

11 million is not really all that bullish... They were think it would take off... they got cocky like Nintendo did(like I said earlier) with the 64. They thought that whatever they put out there will sell...

"so vgc overtracked?
by maybe 300-500k?
(I doupt the PS3 is sold out in UK and France and Germany, the three biggest markets... maybe in Spain, Greece, and Italy)"

This makes no sense, we can't tell if it's over-tracked or under-tracked from this data. We don't know how many were sold in those 5 weeks that had been shipped prior, and we don't know how many shipped in those 5 weeks weren't sold until after that period.

 Besides, after watching the actual interview it's not actually clear if these are sold or shipped.

 11 million was a bullish estimate to stick with, they really should have reduced it a while ago.

According to this VGC has almost 300k more sold than Sony shipped.... granted the number sony gave began dec 1, and Outlawauron's start Nov 25 or so... So still About 150k more sold according to VGC than sony says they shipped... could be off by as much as 500k depending on shortages and how much retailers stocked up out there...

"11 million was a bullish estimate to stick with, they really should have reduced it a while ago."

Agreed, especially with MGS & GTA getting pushed back to the next fiscal year.

tokilamockingbrd,

He gives a total of just over 1.2M, which ends up at just under 1.2M when deducting non SCEE countries. Sony's figure was also 1.2M, I can't see where you're finding a 300K-500K discrepancy.

I guess I am assuming the numbers they gave were shipped not sold, and rounded up... Sony never rounds down...

Considering how many reports we keep reading of "huge piles of PS3s" in various stores, I'm guessing the answer will be "not very fast".

...

It makes sense that shipped = (approx) sold for this time of year

(its even possible for sold to exceed shipped - but not by very much) 

...

8m for the fiscal year sounds perfectly reasonable to me - I think they will do a little more than that (around 8.5-9m). But I could be wrong. Europe sales for this week are down 10% from last week, and they will continue to fall for a while yet.

I still don't understand, how can they round up 300K-500K to 1.2M? That's just not possible.