Today, during Sony’s quarterly conference call for investors and analysts, chief financial officer Hiroki Totoki revealed the company’s prediction for PS5 shipments during the current fiscal year.
First of all, Totoki-san announced that Sony expected to ship 18 million units in the fiscal year 2022 (between April 2022 and March 2023) based on current visibility in parts procurement. This is significantly higher than the 11.5 Million PS5 units shipped between April 2021 and March 2022 and would mark a large increase in the availability of the console
This matches the fact that Sony expects a rather sizable increase in sales for the Games & Network business (34% or 929.2 billion yen) during the fiscal year.
If Sony is successful in matching its forecast, it would grow the grand total of PS5 shipped by March 2023 to 37.3 million units.
It’s worth mentioning that the previous forecast was 22.6 million to be shipped during the fiscal year 2022, but Sony lowered it due to the impact on the production of components of the lockdowns in China caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
We’ll have to wait and see what happens, but Totoki-san mentioned that Sony feels “very comfortable” about being able to hit 18 million units in the fiscal year 2022 and hasn’t given up on doing better, despite the fact that he admitted that the company is still behind in managing to meet demand from potential purchasers.
We also hear from Totoki-san that Sony has “significantly increased investment in content development at existing studios.” This has caused revenue for first-party software to “increase at a high rate.”
The goal is to grow the games business by strengthening the production of first-party software and deploying it on multiple platforms.
Totoki-san then mentioned that Sony has high expectations for hit games and hopes that users will find the new PlayStation Plus offering to be higher quality and easier to use.
If you’d like to learn more about Sony’s financial performance on top of official shipment numbers for PS5 and PS4, you can check out our dedicated article.
