In spite of the ongoing supply shortage, Sony reveals it still wants to sell a whopping 14.8 million PlayStation 5 units for this fiscal year. The reason the tech giant has that particular number as its goal is that that is how many units the still remarkably famous PlayStation 4 sold in its second year.
It was previously reported that the PlayStation 5 sold 4.5 million units in 2020, a huge milestone for Sony in what’s been recently confirmed as its largest console release of all time. Had the hardware not been crippled by shortage problems, it’s likely that number would be even higher.
Because of the global pandemic affecting Sony’s production chain and hackers scalping a huge portion of the consoles that go on sale online, PlayStation 5 supply has been much lesser than the fans and company would like. In the meantime, demand for the console has stayed high, resulting in delivery thefts and retail stores being flocked by hordes of players into the present.
VGC reported that, during a recent earnings call, Hiroki Totoki, Sony’s CFO and Executive VP, revealed the company still wants to sell enough consoles to outperform the PlayStation 4’s 14.8 million mark but also confessed that there will be some difficulties doing so.
While Sony is trying to get its hands on the necessary parts to make more PlayStation 5 units, manufacturing issues at AMD have caused a lack of processors that both the Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 utilize. With the assistance of a translator, Mr. Totoki said,
“Compared to the original plan, we try to procure components at the level of the second year of the launch of the PS4 at 14.8 million – we would like to exceed that level of PS4 when it comes to PS5. However, the level of demand by customers [is] so high for PS5. Therefore, for various devices, we try to procure larger volume. However, we have to look at the global shortage of semiconductors. When we try to increase our capacity, we face difficulties because of this global situation.”
The culprits behind this scarcity are the ongoing global pandemic, a hopefully receding tariff war between China and the US, and, more, unfortunately, and it’s not certain when any of these issues will come to a decisive end. While Microsoft and Sony have made it certain they’d both like to get more consoles to get into the customers’ homes, the problem is basically out of their hands.
