Following the announcement of Sony’s financial results, Osaka-based financial analysis firm Ace Securities posted its report on the results, discussing its expectation for the PS5.
The report, penned by analyst Hideki Yasuda, mentions that the 3.9 million units shipped by Sony during the Holiday quarter were well below the firm’s expectations.
While Sony’s CFO Hiroki Totoki mentioned that it’s theoretically possible to achieve a shipment target matching the 22.6 million units record in the next fiscal year (between April 2022 and March 2023), Yasuda-san expects it to be challenging.
Since the shipments of silicon wafers have hardly increased, the impact of the shortage may still be significant next year, and Yasuda-san believes PS5 shipments to reach around 15 million units.
Yasuda also points out that while the monthly active users on PlayStation Network have increased since the previous quarter, they have dropped by 3 million year-on-year. Yasuda-san argues that the scarcity of PS5 units during the holiday season has made it challenging to retain active users.
Since the firm believes that the stagnation of hardware supply will continue next year, it’s concerned that sluggish hardware sales may cause software sales to decline as well.
While Sony ascribes the decline in software sales year-on-year to the lack of major new release, Ace Securities believes that there is a correlation between the momentum of hardware sales (or lack of thereof) and software sales, so it argues that the shortages in PS5 supply are having an effect.
It’s worth mentioning that if sony were to ship 15 million PS5 units in the next fiscal year, it’d still be significantly more than its revised expectation of 11.5 million units for the current fiscal year. Said forecast has been announced yesterday, dropping from the previous outlook that expressed the expectations of shipping 14.8 million units between April 2021 and March 2022.
Published: Feb 3, 2022 12:19 pm