Sony's Global PS3 Unit Sales

A number of people criticized my previous piece on Sony's PS3 because I didn't have worldwide unit sales numbers. And that was fair (though some of those commenting clearly needed some warm milk and a rest), because you can't reasonable take U.S. sales to represent what the rest of the world might do. So I did some digging and found some numbers for Sony itself. Given that the company has also forecast overall unit sales through March 31, 2009, I think I've got a reasonable handle on just how many game consoles the company is selling. And I also came across some information that helps triangulate, and bring in to question, the spin Microsoft has recently put on the Xbox 360 unit sales.

The data from Sony gets confusing because the company reports sales by fiscal years for which the last day is actually in the next calendar year. (I checked with Sony on this.) But once you remember that the PS3 didn't come out until November 2006, we're on the track to something coherent (and, remember, the dates in the table below refer to calendar years, not Sony's fiscal years):

Now for the estimation. In its revised forecasts for its current fiscal year, Sony says that it expects to sell 10 million PS3 units. Take out the units it has already said have sold so far in the period, and that leaves 6.01 million it would need to sell from October 1, 2008 through March 31, 2009. The only comparable example we have for the PS3 is in Sony's FY 2007, when sales in the third fiscal quarter (October 1, 2007 through December 31, 2007) were about 2.1 times larger than in the fourth fiscal quarter (January 1, 2008 through March 31, 2008). So X plus 2.1X would have to equal 6.01, meaning that the 2008 holiday season would have seen about 4 million unit sales globally. That would bring the total through the end of 2008 to about 20.85 million units.

Of course, that is an approximation. For those who like to claim that the only Apples-to-Apples (pardon the pun) comparison is between the PS3 and the Xbox 360, let's look at what Microsoft has done. The company announced that it had sold 28 million Xbox 360 units through 2008 and claimed that it was 8 million units ahead of Sony. But if my estimate of sales in the last quarter of calendar 2008 are at all accurate, then Microsoft would only be 7.16 million units ahead of Sony, not the 8 million it is claiming.

Now for a short trip down memory lane, when Microsoft claimed in 2006 that it would have a 10 million unit jump start on Sony and Nintendo by the time they had their new consoles out. That would suggest that Microsoft should have at least been 10 million units ahead of Sony now to have held its own. Instead, it may be almost three million off that mark, so you could argue that Sony has been cutting down the lead over time.

And let's look at one more data point. In November, Microsoft said that the Xbox 360 had already sold more than the 25 million units of the original Xbox. Now the company is saying that it has sold 28 million in total. Assuming for a moment that the sales figure would have been accurate as of the end of September 2008 (coinciding with quarterly sales reports), that would mean Microsoft sold at best only 3 million Xbox 360 units worldwide in the last quarter of the year â€" and, if my previous estimate is right, a full million units less than the PS3 in the same time period. [UPDATE: As some have pointed out, Microsoft had claimed 22.5 million units sold at the end of September and 28.5 million sold by the end of December, which would make 6 million during the last quarter of 2008. Though that does have me wondering which big retailers continue to place orders for more product through end of the year. Usually they've already made their bets. Or perhaps they would have had agreements to receive product in stages.]

All that said, Sony still has a dilemma because the PS3 is expensive and the company is under serious financial pressure. Whether you say that the Xbox is "real" competition, or that you have to compare the PS3 to the Wii, is almost immaterial. Sony's ability to compete will still come down to finances. And the company will have to do something to please investors by controlling costs. But its positioning as more value, and its insistence that it will look at a decade of total sales, paints management into a corner.