Sony Increases PS5 Forecast to 19 Million for Current Fiscal Year - Sales
by William D'Angelo , posted on 02 February 2023 / 6,463 Views
Sony Interactive Entertainment announced it has increased its forecast for PlayStation 5 shipments for the current fiscal year, which ends March 31, 2023. The increase was by one million units shipped from 18 million to 19 million.
In order for Sony to reach its forecast for the PlayStation 5, it will need to hit a target of 6.2 million units from January to March 2023.
"Based on this result, we have set our sales forecast for the fiscal year at 19 million units," reads the announcement from Sony. "By optimizing our operations, we are exerting every effort to sell as many units as possible to meet the strong demand."
If Sony is able to ship 6.2 million units for the March 2023 quarter, it should close the gap between the PS5 and PS4 from 5.6 million units at the end of December 2022 to 1.8 million units as the PS4 had shipped 2.4 million units for its equivalent March quarter.
For the quarter ending December 31, 2022, Sony had shipped 7.1 million PlayStation 5 consoles to bring lifetime shipment total to 32.1 million units.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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And people were saying Sony wasn't going to reach the previous target and Sony increased it =p
to be fair... it didnt look like they were going to hit it. Dropping PS4 and upping PS5 production helped.
yep, the doubts were justified
I think people were saying that they weren't going to hit their original April 2022-March 2023 fiscal year goal of 22.6m which they gave in November 2021, not their revised down goal of 18m which they gave in May 2022. They might have missed when Sony revised it down to 18m, I know I did, I thought they were still aiming for 22.6m which seemed unrealistic.
Nope, people were still finding impossible to achieve the latest 18M because that would be to much for the Q4 based on the sales reported for Dec end.
Looking into the stats just now, something does feel very off. VGC is tracking 11.76m PS5's sold between April 1, 2022 and December 31, 2022. If that is accurate, it would mean that Sony needs to sell more than 7m units between January and the end of March in order to hit this 19m fiscal year estimate. That would be a ridiculously large Q1 shipment size, larger than their Q4 Holiday shipment size.
So maybe VGC is still undertracked on PS5? But I don't see how they could be, Sony official number was 20m at the end of May 2022 and 30m at the end of December 2022, so they sold 10m units in 7 months of 2022 officially. Assuming April and May were about 1m each, that would put fiscal year so far sales at about 12m end of December, nearly the same as the 11.76m that VGC is tracking, so if they are undertracked it's only by a few hundred thousand units, not millions of units. Meaning Sony really do think they can sell 7m units between January 1 and March 31, 2023. Maybe they can, maybe they held back some Holiday units to have more PS5's ready for the launch of PSVR2 and their Hogwarts Legacy marketing deal. I guess we'll see.
VGC shouldn't be undertracking because they had updated their numbers with that last Sony release of sold through (perhaps there were already a healthy number of shipped over sold that skew what remains to be shipped). If the previous target was already hard or impossible to achieve it wouldn't make sense to increase it.
This is a case of doesn't matter if Sony can or can't sell/ship (and if PSVR2 will be successful) it will be funny anyway because either Sony is going to be breaking records for the quarter or will be totally of mark (and perhaps considering price cuts).
They can reach it,
Ps5 is still one of the most coveted tech right now!
That's... Really impressive not gonna lie. Again the thing people fail to realize is that demand doesn't evaporate when supply is not sufficient. That should take PS5 to 38 million by March.
Wouldn't they need to sell 6.5M consoles or something from January until March for this to happen?
I don't see how this would happen. That would be the best non-holiday quarter for pretty much any console ever.
Ship not sell to customer, and if the demand isn't satisfied yet that isn't impossible.
You don't want to oversaturate your product in stores though. Demand hasn't been met because of continued shortages, that doesn't mean 6.2M consoles will be sold in a non holiday when people see that there is a steady influx of consoles.
Not impossible, sure. Just not probably imo
yep overshipping isn't good.
To be fair there is so little stock at the moment that a bit of overshipping can't harm at the moment. Plenty of ships want to have the PS5 readily available by now. Also Europe deserves some major shipments.
Yep on the current rythm with inventories basically at zero even 1 or 2M overship for a single quarter wouldn't be an issue at most they would have to normalize on Q1 of the next FY.
To meet the target, they need to ship 477k on average every week. I think it's time to see, if the demand is really that high. I'm looking forward to the next couple of weeks.
The PS5's internals are brilliant. The GPU is small and fast, cheap to make. This new forecast seems to imply the PS5 redesign will be available in volume this year. Nice. (the PS5 GPU is slightly larger than the Radeon 6650 XT). The PS5 digital is available in my local Bestbuy, in store, for the first time, this week. Cheaper with a controller than the Switch with a controller. Going to sell gangbusters this year if the games don't suck. Nintendo still makes the best games.
I dare say this would be the best quarter for any PlayStation console outside of the holiday season.
Yep, this would be sales on DS or Switch level at their peak.
Essay Pro