PlayStation 5 sales hit 17.3 million, but sales forecasts drop due to chip shortages

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Sony has revealed PlayStation 5 console sales have reached 17.3 million by the end of 2021 in its latest earnings report.

However, the company added it’s revising its forecasted sales of PlayStation 5 consoles to 11.5 million units for FY 2021. This is, Sony says, due to “limitations on the supply of components, especially semiconductors, and an increase in delivery times resulting from disruption of the global distribution supply chain”.

As senior analyst Daniel Ahmad notes, that’s less than the 20.2 million PlayStation 4 consoles sold in the same timeframe. Though PS5 sales outpaced the PS4 during the summer, it seems things slowed down in the Holiday period. Previously, Sony had predicted it’d sell 14.8 million units between April 2021 and March 2022.

Sony expected to ship 22.6 million PS5 consoles by the end of March 2022, according to a report back in August. That figure of sales from the PS5’s launch in November 2019 has now been revised to 19.3 million. However, Ahmad says that Sony expects to make up the shortfall over time.

It was reported that PlayStation 4 production would be extended into 2022 to help offset the scarcity of PS5 consoles. Sony denied this reasoning, however, claiming to NLab that the plan was always to continue production through 2022. Conversely, Xbox One production was apparently quietly ended at the end of 2020.

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