Sony says that supply for the PS5 will unlikely improve drastically by the end of the year as the company tries to cope with massive stock shortages surrounding the semiconductor industry. Sony boasted some incredible sales numbers yesterday as the company claimed they had shipped and sold 7.8 million PS5 consoles since launch in November 2020. However, things would have been very different if Sony had more stock to sell and they are aware of the ongoing situation.
During an investors call following the sales results, Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki said the company does not expect to completely resolve supply issues surrounding the PS5 by the end of the year. Totoki also claims that Sony is currently investigating various solutions to the ongoing stock shortages to help cope with the global shortage of hardware components. This includes altering hardware designs and sourcing secondary suppliers.
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While the company says they are aiming for better sales than the PS4 in the year ahead, they confirmed that there is no possible way to drastically increase the supply of the PS5. It is very unlikely stock will improve and users will be able to find ample console units in their region.
“The shortage of semiconductors is one factor, but there are other factors that will impact on the production volume. So, at present, we’d like to aim at beating second year sales of 14.8 million, which was the second year of PS4.”
Totoki says that Sony may find ways to cope with the shortages. For example, he says finding a secondary source would be ideal but changing the design of the console could be another route. This would be the worst-case scenario of course. He says that Sony would like to have the flexibility to adapt to the situation should it worsen.
While it was great to get new consoles and GPUs in 2020, the timing could also not have been any worse. The covid-19 pandemic crippled the tech industry causing massive shortages of semiconductors worldwide. The shortages affected not only the launch of the PS5, Xbox Series X/S, AMD and NVIDIA GPUs but also cars, toys, smartphones and more. Samsung announced that they may even skip out on launching their annual Galaxy Note phone this year as shortages worsen.
Source: VGC
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