Official Sony earning report. If you look carefully you'll see that they switched from reporting units shipped to recorded sales in Q1 of FY07. This doesn't mean they've sold 10.5 million though as the FY06 numbers still represent shipped.

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/fr/07q3_eleki.pdf

sounds about right. 9m sold, 10.5 shipped.

Sony sells to Best Buy, and Circuit City.. they don't give them for free.

Those are the reported sales numbers.

recorded sales are still sold to retailers because retailers pay for those consoles

I find 1.5m to be too large to be the difference between shipped and sold

Shipped are manufactured and shipped into storage. Sold are units sold to a retailer or retail chain.

Sony doesn't report sales to the consumer - they can't report sales to the consumer.

 Presumably they are told by the the retailer how many are sold. if not, they can probably work it out

'Shipped' previously meant manufactured, and sold means "sold to retailers' which is interchangable with shipped.  Because they changed the way they count, they counted 1.9 million units twice -- they were 'shipped' as of FY07, then they got 'sold' in FY08 (the 5.5 - 3.6 gap represented in FY07 reportedly 'shipped').

This has been discussed before.

Sony used to report production numbers (shipments to their own warehouses).
Now they report the numbers sold to retailers, like Microsoft and Nintendo already did.