"January 25, 2001 - Sony Corp announced on Thursday that it expects to ship a total of nine million PlayStation 2s by the end of the current business year that ends on March 31, 2001, which is down from its previous forecast of 10 million units. This shipment reduction, however, will not affect the North American market according to PR representatives at Sony Computer Entertainment America. SCEA still expects to meet its target of three million units shipped in North America by March 31."                                      http://ps2.ign.com/articles/090/090491p1.html

Heh, has this thread changed from 5.5 Million PS3s Shipped to Everyone versus Larry ? :D

LoL. Love PR spins.

But to Sid Cedric- Sold to retailers but still in Sony warehouses does not equal= units shipped. Those still sitting in Sony warehouses that may have been bought but have not left Sony shouldn't be includented as they haven't been formally shipped yet. That's like counting pre-orders as units sold. It just don't work that way.

 Sale.  Ship is an entirely different thing.  It's obvious Sony is most likely ramping up to perform acts of large large overshipment.  Although the numbers loook pretty on the outside then you'll have a nice semester or 2 of really bad shipments.  Even worse than that sales will be lagging way behind.  In the long run overshipping is not a good idea especially when competing against something that is saling.

Sold is sold to a retailer, once the retailer has bought from sony it's sold. Sony's customers are the shops, we buy it from the shops and then we have bought the right to a year manufacturer's guarantee. The fact remains we are not sony's direct customers, the retailers are. According to the report Shipped is when the product leaves the factory and NOT the warehouse, this clearly implies it's the shipping of the manufacturing stage thats being recorded to prove that they have been made. Therefore these Items are either in transit or in a warehouse. I find it hard to believe that 1.9 million units are in transit, are they going to the stores that have yet to sell all the units that have already been delivered? Why would a store buy more goods if they haven't sold the first batches? I think most of these items are being stored in Sony's warehouses.

That's so true. It's tough to cut manufacturing costs if you aren't manufacturing in large quantaties. According to these figures there are currently circa 2M PS3s in circulation that haven't found a home yet so it's fair to assume Sony have cut back their manufacturing output.

Of course, the cost of components will trend downwards anyway, but it's basic economics that the more of a product you buy the less you pay per unit.

Ha this thread is funny. It all boils down to what Sony thinks of as customers. I know that all companies think if 'customer' as retailers. As retailer buy the product from them. We, as in you (larry, ioi, etc) and me are 'end users'. For a company like Dell or HP we can be both end users and customers as we can buy directly from them. But you cannot buy a PS3 directly from Sony, and thus you are not Sony's customer, your are walmart's or gamestop's customer. So, when Sony or MS or any other company that talks about selling anything they are talking about the retailer. 'Shipped from manufacturing base' is pretty clear to me. All of these companies have a manufacturing plant and warehousing. They are not the same building and usually not the same locations. Sony is simply saying they built and moved 5.5m units to warehouses. They also sold 3.6m units to their various retail customers around the world. Then we have NDP and other sales tracking companies that show us that about 3m end uses actually purchased a PS3 from those retailers. I mean c'mon how could it be different. Look and tally up what NDP claims for NA, then add to that what numbers came out of various sales tracking in EU, and Japan. It all comes out to about 3m, not anywhere near 3.6m. This is the same stupid arguement that people had when MS said they sold 10.4m through December of 2006. They sure did...to walmart, gamestop,amazon, etc.

 2. "Perhaps that's why the company chose to stick to a more conservative sales forecast of 11 million units this year."                                         http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/may2007/gb20070516_346923.htm

Sony is doing the same thing.