Whether, ignorance, stupidity or stubborness some people will never seem to check facts. I must have presented this link 100 times already and still people refuse to look at it. The truth burns.

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/fr/07q2_eleki.pdf

Well, someone has to say it:

Attack its weak point for MASSIVE DAMAGE!

OK, back to your regularly scheduled topic.

Kind of ridiculous claiming record holiday sales in europe, when this is the PS3's first holiday on the market here.

 Point!

Thanks for putting that here again, seems that Sony can twist their numbers to their liking so it fits the related context best. I wonder when they will change from "recorded sales" to "made up sales". I wish them all the best for their sales but all this PR stunts are getting kind of ridiculous ....

Claiming Record Holiday Sales in Europe for its first holiday season is like claiming that you made 1st place in a highscore without telling that it was an empty highscore before :)

Kaz Hirai still hasn't let go? he's almost as crazy as crazy Ken.

Either that or he is banking on spinning it into LTD numbers, instead of fiscal year.

wiifm,

How are the figures in that link twisted? Those are what Sony has sold to retailers, they can't just make up numbers in a financial earnings statement, that would be illegal.

I was thinking that too, Good call Good call...

They came pretty close in Q1 of FY08. At the end of FY07, Sony claimed 5.5 million PS3's "shipped", defining "shipped" as "produced and put in warehouses." And they claimed 3.6 million units sold, defining sold as "shipped to retailers", which is a fairly common practice. However, it was clearly misleading as investors though they meant "shipped" as in "shipped to retailers" and sold as in "sold to customers." It was then that they announced they'd ship 11 million PS3s in FY08.

At Q1 of FY08, Sony redefined "shipped" as "shipped to retailers" which is the standard method of counting. Despite a significant change in their numbers because of this, they left their FY07 numbers using the old method. The difference between the old and new method of counting was 1.9 million units. Effectively, they decreased their end-of-FY08 LTD projections from 16.5 million units to 14.6 million units without saying it in those terms.

You can easily argue that they were twisting their number to mislead (and seemingly mislead a lot of reporters successfully). The advantage for Sony is that they've got reporters out there missing the ball on the 1.9 million units they didn't actually ship, so they're overreporting Sony's numbers for them.

As was pointed out, it's doubly ridiculous for Sony to claim "record" PS3 sales its first holiday season on the market, since *any* holiday sales would be "record" holiday sales.

Being extremely generous, let's say Sony "shipped" 10 million total units.  Minus the 5.5 million units they shipped in FY07 and plus the 1.9 million units they redefined as "not yet shipped" by changing their counting methods, they still have 4.6 million units to ship in a quarter that's traditionally very slow.