Why does Sony keep saying that they have SOLD 5.5 million units when they have not yet even sold 4 million?

I dunno why you askin us?

5.5 mil ... Sold to retailers!... And they say... Sold ... To act like they sell more than they really do ...

And same goes for X360 and Wii... X360 sold 11.4 mil to retailers whilst it has only sold 10.2 or something to people. And same for Wii... Only problem is: They always sell out!... So the 'sold to retailers' numbers are very close to the 'actually sold' numbers... For Wii.

I think they said 5.5 million shipped and 3.6 million sold as of March 31, 2007.  They define "shipped" as "shipped from factories" (as in to warehouses) and "sold" as "sold to customers" where their customers are retailers.

When they 'sell' consoles to their customers -- the retailers -- the retailers have 30-60 days to pay them back, during which period they hope to sell the console.  So those 3.6 million are consoles which *should* be sold within 60 days at the most.

People often misquote releases and confuse shipped and sold.  Find me a source where Sony themselves says they sold 5.5 million.

This is a forum leo-j. :)

Yes, a forum that requires a sarcasm filter.

Im just being sarcastic, look this was already discussed before, sony did sell 5.5 million ps3's as of march 07, but to stores which this chart only counts units sold to people.

Jack Tretton himself said it on CNBC. And he very specifically says that they have sold 5.5 million units instead of the 6 million that they wanted to sell. Does he mean he wanted to create more because they really havent sold 5.5 million?

Sorry TheBigFatJ I wasnt able to get your quote properly I meant to include yours not Starcraft Maniac, (Sorry Maniac)

Alexie, it means that Sony wanted to ship 6m by the March time period, but either couldn't make or sell that many units to retailers.

Sony cannot create more units than they can sell, or else they'd be laying off every single worker for months, as I doubt most any retailer has made any major purchase orders in the past 3 months for new units.

Realilistically, the only place that'd get new units shipped to it would be PAL territories where the PS3 is still selling at any remote level that might require more supply. Other than that, don't expect Sony official data to reflect more than 750,000 units shipped last quarter, if that.