Sony gets enough chips to sell 12.5 million PS5s until April 2022

Sony has announced that it has arranged enough chipsets to sell a total of 12.5 million PS5s during the rest of this year and the first quarter of next year. 10.1 million PS5s have been sold to date.

During an oral presentation of the quarterly earnings, Sony chief financial officer Hiroki Totoki said the target number of PlayStation 5 consoles sold for the current fiscal year is above 14.8 million. The current fiscal year as Sony maintains it runs from April 1, 2021 to March 31, 2022. In accordance with this fiscal year, the first quarter was completed at the end of June. Sony now presents its quarterly figures.

In a more detailed statement, the company reports that it sold 2.3 million PS5s in the past quarter. This brings the total number of PS5 consoles sold from release to the end of June to 10.1 million. Tokoki says that his company has arranged the necessary number of chipsets to achieve the target of 14.8 million units, Twinfinite writes, among others, based on an oral explanation. Because 2.3 million have already been sold, Sony should sell a total of 12.5 million PlayStation 5 consoles in the current, ongoing second quarter and the following six months.

In May, Tokoki already indicated that the target sales number of 14.8 million units must be reached in the current fiscal year to keep up with the sales figures of the PlayStation 4 at the time, Bloomberg wrote. The CEO also pointed out that it is virtually impossible to meet the demand, even if the company were able to get more chipsets and thus supply more PlayStation 5 copies.

PlayStation 5 sales fall into the Game & Network Services segment. That segment achieved a turnover of EUR 4.76 billion in the past quarter. That is an increase of two percent compared to the same period a year earlier. This slight increase is mainly due to the high demand for PS5s; turnover from hardware increased from 429 million euros to almost 933 million euros.

This hardware mainly concerns PS5 consoles; of that, 2.3 million were sold in the past quarter, compared to half a million PS4s. This number of 2.3 million is the lowest PS5 sales in a quarter since release; 3.3 million units were sold in the previous quarter and 4.5 million in the quarter of release. There have only been three quarters of the PS5 being sold.

When announcing the quarterly figures for the first three months of this year, Sony announced that the PlayStation 5 was still being sold below cost. This had a negative impact on the figures at the time. There has now been a turning point. During the current oral explanation, Totoki announced that the $500 PlayStation 5 version with disc tray is no longer being sold at a loss. The latter is still the case with the digital edition of the PS5, which costs 400 euros.

Total sales in Sony’s gaming segment have only increased by two percent. This is mainly because less good results were achieved in the sale of games. The turnover from the sale of game software fell from the converted 3.34 billion euros to 2.67 billion euros. There is a decline in physical and digital software as well as add-on content.

In the first quarter a year ago, 91.4 million games were sold. Sony itself delivered 18.7 million first-party games at the time. This fell to 63.6 million units in the quarter and Sony supplied 10.5 million first-party games itself. Those are the games released by Sony’s own PlayStation Studios. This decrease is probably due to the very good quarter of a year ago. Then many people were at home because of the pandemic and sales rose. Such an effect is also visible in Microsoft’s Xbox game sales.

In terms of televisions, Sony shipped 2.2 million units, an increase from the 1.5 million televisions the manufacturer shipped in the same quarter a year ago. Other categories in the Electronics Products & Solutions segment also performed well and delivered significantly higher sales, such as digital cameras and products in the Audio & Video category. However, the company does not provide exact numbers.

In the past quarter, Sony’s operating income amounted to EUR 2.17 billion, an increase of 26 percent. Total turnover rose by 15 percent to 2256.8 billion Japanese yen, equivalent to about 17.5 billion euros. Net profit rose by 9 percent to 1.64 billion euros.