They changed their accounting method for sold units in 2007 I believe, which could cause a couple million discrepancy. They changed sold to mean units shipped. Prior to that year, sold meant units produced.

Not necessarily, if the replacement units theory is correct, they may have been shipped for free instead of sold.

No hardware is unbreakable. That said, there could be a mixture of two factors here, undertracking and replacement units skewing shipment data.

You know this is trolling. Well of course you do because I just warned you.

Sony had shipped 44 million PSPs through September, and they shipped another 5m in the quarter ending December.

We'll see if VGC undertracked with March shipment numbers. If Sony ships a high amount again in the Jan-March period, that means they had a proper level of sell-through in the holiday.

If they ship a very small amount in the Jan-March period, it means they overshipped over the holidays, and retaillers need to return to proper inventory levels.

I expect that they overshipped. It seems to me that Sony has overshipped during the holidays for all three of their current systems. They also had a Nintendo-like undershipped sell-out holiday one year with PS2. It happens.

VGChartz undertrack all three Sony platforms it seems. That can led you to some... thinking.

Guess Q4 should give us an idea if they overshipped for Q3

Can some one please tell me how they started believing Sony report replaced units as shipped ? I mean all i've seen is that "Sqrl" said it , i'm not saying it's wrong but there doesn't seem to be alot of justification for something so significant.

@FishieJoe : is it now possible to troll against a person ? , if he was being offensive then fair enough but saying something that put you in a bad light doesn't quality as trolling especialy since it might be enforced by the content of your posts .

I just called it trolling for lack of a better term to describe what he did. Technically it would be in violation of either rule 5 or 9 of the forum rules.

Sony says:

"Beginning with Q1 FY07, the method of reporting hardware and software unit sales has been changed from production shipments to recorded sales"

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/fr/viewer/07q1/slide/image/12_image.jpg

Considering that replacement units have to be produced like any other, it's logical to conclude that replacement units used to be counted as shipped but aren't anymore.