Sony Cuts PS5 Sales Forecast By Millions Of Units

We are in the second year since the PlayStation 5 officially launched and still many potential purchasers have been struggling to get their hands on the fabled Sony latest gen console. Don't worry if you think it is only you. Sony has long acknowledged that the PS5 launch is suffering from severe supply issues especially when compared to the demand.

Despite frustrations it's not really Sony's fault. Due to a sharp increase in demand in the past few years, computer chip manufacturers simply don't have the resources capable of keeping up with demand. Lisa Su, CEO of major chip producer AMD has said that she doesn't predict that supply issues will ease until the end of this year.

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There are a number of factors which have caused the demand for chips to skyrocket. There have been a number of business goings on behind the scenes, such as Nvidia's proposed purchase of Arm. This leads to uncertainty in the future of production for the companies. However, far more than this is consumer demand.

Technology is naturally moving ever forward and people have more gadgets in their homes than ever before. The largest increase in computer chip usage however comes by far from the emergence of NFTs and cryptocurrency mining. The process used to create these requires and expends more chips than many other technological industries.

Sony anticipated that the shortages would ease for its second year of sales. According to IGN, it predicted it could create and sell almost 15million units by March 2022. However, It has dropped this target by over 3million, now down to 11.5million.

In a quarterly earnings call CFO Hiroki Totoki said this on the shortages:

"[We are working closely with] our partner companies supplying us with components – collaborating, negotiating and working with them closely. We hope we can make that happen, but in terms of [PS5], I think it's safe to say that we will continue to have supply disruption in terms of the components globally, because of the distribution problems and so on. So we can't say for sure what is exactly the demand for next year."

The console is still selling as fast as supply allows, and is considered an extremely successful launch for Sony. To date over 18million consoles have been sold to the public.

Topics: PlayStation, PlayStation 5