One more thing. The statement above is actually incorrect. GAAP rules determain the content of the formal financial statements.

Amirnetz, this guy is the boss, show some respect.

Also, show some respect to my lover, her name is mathematics and you will treat her better than you were in that post

No one's perfect at tracking everything.

I am not concerned. I just enjoy the discussion and the banter

As I wrote somewhere above, ioi is within 2% of the real numbers. Very commendable. 

One small question why does Europe start sooner than America? Is it similar to our Black Friday or does our Black Friday actually slow our holiday sales by a week?

OK. I think I figured out where the numbers started to go wrong and trouble me. This is actually pretty interesting if you care about the math.

It is the beginning of June 2008 and VGC is reporting the Xbox Europian LTD sales to stand on 5.2M. 
 

5.2M was a clear VGC overtrack. Microsoft is telling us now that the EMEA LTD shipments by June were actually only 5M. Since some of the units were in the channel (~0.4M-0.5M) then the actual units sold to customers were really about 4.5M. This is significanty less than the 5.2M tracked by VGC.

In following months (July- Sep) VGC actually undertracked the Xbox causing me to raise the red flag in my October posting (finding the discrepency between Microsoft shipments and VGC tracking). As it happens, the summer undertracking by VGC actually compensated the prior overtracking until June and got it to a more accurate point at the end of September.

At the end of September VGC puts Microsoft on 21.27M units LTD WW. Microsoft reported 22.5M in LTD shipments for the same period. This means that VGC puts the channel inventory on 1.25M. That's 2.5 months of inventory based on the July-Aug monthly average. This would seem to be a pretty high number. Remember that the 360 also had this very sudden surge following the price cut at the end of September that would have depleted the inventories. Still VGC propose 2.5 months of inventory left.

Anyway - that's where the problem begins. The WW sell-though at the end of September should have been higher, probably by about 300K. In October VGC undertracked the 360 in the US by about 100K (compared to NPD) and these 100K + 300K from before would explain the gap between my math and ioi.

So yes - I do believe that the math suggests that the sell through for the 360 should be about 300K-500K higher. But as suggested above by SpartanFX- this will clear up when we get the official shipping numbers from Microsoft in January (or if they will be nice to continue to provide on going shipment numbers during December).

Could you please link to your sources when you say that MS said that EMEA shipments by June, and all of that other things? Generally, these things are just tiny mistakes, but that get some pretty big causes to your logic and conclusion.

Thanks in advance.

You may want to read my other posts on public statements from companies on that detail their business performance.

The short story - they cannot lie about business performance. It is illegal. When Microsoft reports that at least 2M units were shipped in EMEA between June and Nov 19th then it is the truth. If June was actually more than 5M (and therefore they sold less than 2M since) then they are creating a false representation of their business performance. This is is illegal and they could be held liable.

Companies may cherry pick the business performance numbers they are using in their PRs. But whatever they report is matching their books.

You mention he might not have read your other posts, yet you clearly didn't read the many posts that state where you are wrong about this in regards to media announcements. They don't have to be 100% perfect in a media announcement, so they can and do round off numbers.

That and I don't think you read my post where they had 4m in the channel in January of 2007.

It is for some people...