All purpose Sales and Sales Rumours and Anecdotes [2022 Edition]

[Deleted member 11852]

Interesting not in how many consoles were sold. Nowhere in my post did I mention that the PS5 wasn't in higher demand. That's a known and a given. The entire tech industry is being impacted by global shortages.

My misunderstanding, sorry. Yes, the shortage is impacting everybody but it's probably not impacting everybody equally. Big customers of TSMC who have a lot of different silicon produced may have more capacity and manourvability about how much of what is produced than smaller customers. I would think that Sony, who may a lot of different devices, are probably a fair-sized TSMC customer.

TSMC make Sony's PlayStation chips, their smartphone chips, their sensors, their custom silicon for TVs and professional broadcast equipment, their custom silicon for their cameras and probably a bunch of things I've forgotten. I would also be shocked if some companies who originally had capacity on certain lines booked, weren't willing to sell/swap those slots with other customers because clearly the pandemic has shaken predicted demands. Lots of things have increased in demand, and a bunch have decreased. If you find yourself suddenly not needing chips and you have capacity, selling that to somebody desperate makes sense - assuming your lines are compatible with their needs.

 

[PSman1700]

Push square article on the matter.

https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2022/02/ps5-sales-hit-17-3-million-now-selling-slower-than-ps4

PS5 Sales Hit 17.3 Million, Now Selling Slower Than PS4

 

[Shortbread]

Is TSMC and Sony still partnering on building a chip-fab in Japan? If so, hopefully by mid 2025 some of Sony's PS5 chip shortages will improve.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/sony-invest-500-mln-tsmcs-new-chip-unit-japan-2021-11-09/

Construction of the factory, which local media said last month would supply semiconductors to Sony's image sensor business, will begin in 2022, with production slated to begin at the end of 2024, the companies said in a press release.

I know it states sensors, but I remember hearing a story that chips for PS5 could be a possibility as well.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Is TSMC and Sony still partnering on building a chip-fab in Japan? If so, hopefully by mid 2025 some of Sony's PS5 chip shortages will improve.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/sony-invest-500-mln-tsmcs-new-chip-unit-japan-2021-11-09/


I know it states sensors, but I remember hearing a story that chips for PS5 could be a possibility as well.

Unless there's more large investments the fab will be for cheaper larger nodes.

The plant will produce 22-nanometer and 28-nanometer chips to address strong global demand for speciality chip technologies, they said.

Much cheaper to get the equipment for 22 nm and 28 nm than it is to implement 7 nm and lower nodes.

I don't see it happening, but you never know. They may decide in the future to drop a few billion more USD into it to swap out the 22 and 28 nm equipment for 7 nm or lower equipment.

However, I only really see that happening if demand for Sony camera sensors drops significantly.

Regards,
SB

 

[Shortbread]

Unless there's more large investments the fab will be for cheaper larger nodes.

Much cheaper to get the equipment for 22 nm and 28 nm than it is to implement 7 nm and lower nodes.

I don't see it happening, but you never know. They may decide in the future to drop a few billion more USD into it to swap out the 22 and 28 nm equipment for 7 nm or lower equipment.

However, I only really see that happening if demand for Sony camera sensors drops significantly.

Regards,
SB

With the Japanese government covering a large share of the $7 billion project, hopefully, Sony is thinking about the possibilities of investing more into smaller nodes.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

With the Japanese government covering a large share of the $7 billion project, hopefully, Sony is thinking about the possibilities of investing more into smaller nodes.

While gaming is more "accepted" in Japan now than in the 80's, it's still not considered a respectable business in the same was as camera sensors or other electronics among older Japanese (who make up most of the government) and women. So, it's far easier to get approval for large government spending on camera sensors than it would be if the primary use would be chips used for gaming consoles.

If Sony were still making PC's and contracting with TSMC for PC chips, they'd have an easier time convincing the government to help defray the costs. Basically for the government of Japan to invest in something like that in a signficant way, Sony would have a better chance if they could show that the 7 nm capacity would be mostly used for non-gaming purposes.

Japan is still a very interesting mix of high technology combined with really traditional thinking. In some ways the government is more progressive than say the US government but in many ways it's much more conservative than the US government.

Considering how easy it is for politicians in power to fall out of favor and basically have to give up their government post, they tend to vote either conservatively or if it's something more progressive then it'll generally be something that the women in Japan are wanting (to an extent). Which is why you end up with this weird situation where Japan produces a prodigious amount of pornography but at the same time that pornography must be censored.

Regards,
SB

 

[BRiT]

For fiscal year.
Q1: 2.3
Q2: 3.3
Q3 (holiday): 3.9
Total: 9.5 million

Only expecting to ship 2 million PS5s this quarter. Shortage is killer and they're talking about it again on the call right now.​

https://twitter.com/x/status/1488770434367516674

 

[PSman1700]

Damn, the situation is truly dire right now around the globe for hardware.

 

[eastmen]

Only up to a point for PS4. After the first few months the console was no longer supply limited. At that point it doesn't matter how many PS4's Sony made, they wouldn't have sold more of them without a significant price cut.

So, if we only compared the timeline up to summer of 2021, then it'd be somewhat similar. However, demand was nowhere near as high for PS4 during that timeline as it was for PS5 as evidenced by how quickly scalping prices dropped for PS4 even while supply limited.

In other words, within that timeline, if supply were unlimited significantly more additional PS5s would have sold versus how many PS4s would have sold.

Regards,
SB

It's really only up to a point. If sony shipped 50m consoles through holiday 2021 would they have sold all 50m ? How much of people trying to find them is simply because they are hard to find ?

I am sure they could have sold more than they actually produced right now but how much more is the question.

For fiscal year.
Q1: 2.3
Q2: 3.3
Q3 (holiday): 3.9
Total: 9.5 million

Only expecting to ship 2 million PS5s this quarter. Shortage is killer and they're talking about it again on the call right now.​

https://twitter.com/x/status/1488770434367516674

Microsoft will most likely out ship them this quarter then. Will be interesting to see if MS can keep systems moving or if they start to stall out.

MS have anything big front half of the year that is xbox/pc exclusive ?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

OK, the following is using data from VGChartz, so take with a grain of salt or for people that do not like VGChartz, just ignore it.

PS5 vs Xbox Series X|S vs Switch Sales Comparison Charts Through January 22 (vgchartz.com)

The absolute numbers I'm not so interested from that. It's the relative numbers.

Due to supply issues that Sony have mentioned their Year to Year sales numbers for 2022 are slightly down. 472,755 sold in 2021 up to Jan. 22nd and 468,960 sold through in 2022. So units supplied was down 0.8% YoY for Jan. 1st to the 22nd.

Microsoft OTOH has increased their supply of consoles rather significantly from a year ago. 289,493 sold in 2021 up to Jan. 22nd and 429,472 sold through in the same period in 2022. Units supplied was up 48.4% YoY for Jan. 1st to the 22nd.

Both companies have been supply limited this entire time, but MS has somehow managed to increase production of XBS consoles despite these shortages while Sony have had less success in that area.

NOTE - these numbers are completely a reflection of the supply side conditions for both companies and says absolutely nothing about the demand side conditions for each company's consoles. Also I wouldn't consider these as entirely accurate numbers, but they should be roughly in that region with some small margin of error.

Regards,
SB

 

[eastmen]

OK, the following is using data from VGChartz, so take with a grain of salt or for people that do not like VGChartz, just ignore it.

PS5 vs Xbox Series X|S vs Switch Sales Comparison Charts Through January 22 (vgchartz.com)

The absolute numbers I'm not so interested from that. It's the relative numbers.

Due to supply issues that Sony have mentioned their Year to Year sales numbers for 2022 are slightly down. 472,755 sold in 2021 up to Jan. 22nd and 468,960 sold through in 2022. So units supplied was down 0.8% YoY for Jan. 1st to the 22nd.

Microsoft OTOH has increased their supply of consoles rather significantly from a year ago. 289,493 sold in 2021 up to Jan. 22nd and 429,472 sold through in the same period in 2022. Units supplied was up 48.4% YoY for Jan. 1st to the 22nd.

Both companies have been supply limited this entire time, but MS has somehow managed to increase production of XBS consoles despite these shortages while Sony have had less success in that area.

NOTE - these numbers are completely a reflection of the supply side conditions for both companies and says absolutely nothing about the demand side conditions for each company's consoles. Also I wouldn't consider these as entirely accurate numbers, but they should be roughly in that region with some small margin of error.

Regards,
SB

I believe Sony had more capacity bought on the front end while MS had more capacity spread out over the year. I also believe that MS has other contracts for amd products in surface and data centers and so MS may be able to purchase more capacity from AMD because of that. There is also a rumor of MS adding more amd chips to the surface product line. Apparently the new am5 socket and chips are in the running for the go all the way up to the redesigned surface studio.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I believe Sony had more capacity bought on the front end while MS had more capacity spread out over the year. I also believe that MS has other contracts for amd products in surface and data centers and so MS may be able to purchase more capacity from AMD because of that. There is also a rumor of MS adding more amd chips to the surface product line. Apparently the new am5 socket and chips are in the running for the go all the way up to the redesigned surface studio.

It's unlikely that Sony has a worse deal than MS when it comes to contracting with AMD/TSMC when it comes to the SOC used in their consoles. Espcially if you consider that in terms of volume, Sony likely sold as many or more PS4s per year than XBO's and Surface devices combined. And if you consider that Intel is used in more Surface devices, Sony quite obviously moves more AMD silicon than Microsoft does. So it wouldn't make sense that any contracts for the manufacture of PS5 SOCs would be worse than the contracts that MS has for XBS SOCs.

IMO, it's far more likely that supply issues for Sony when compared to MS is the supply of components or sub-components used in manufacturing a PS5. Further, I believe it's more likely a supply limitation in one or more of the custom components (liquid metal, the custom SSD chipset, etc.) that the PS5 uses. I say that as I can't see Sony being at a disadvantage compared to MS WRT sourcing and acquiring more generic industry wide components.

Regards,
SB

 

[Eolirin]

It's unlikely that Sony has a worse deal than MS when it comes to contracting with AMD/TSMC when it comes to the SOC used in their consoles. Espcially if you consider that in terms of volume, Sony likely sold as many or more PS4s per year than XBO's and Surface devices combined. And if you consider that Intel is used in more Surface devices, Sony quite obviously moves more AMD silicon than Microsoft does. So it wouldn't make sense that any contracts for the manufacture of PS5 SOCs would be worse than the contracts that MS has for XBS SOCs.

IMO, it's far more likely that supply issues for Sony when compared to MS is the supply of components or sub-components used in manufacturing a PS5. Further, I believe it's more likely a supply limitation in one or more of the custom components (liquid metal, the custom SSD chipset, etc.) that the PS5 uses. I say that as I can't see Sony being at a disadvantage compared to MS WRT sourcing and acquiring more generic industry wide components.

Regards,
SB

MS has also been diverting Series X components into Azure server blades, and they've probably finished scaling that out. So earlier on MS was further reducing their ability to supply consoles beyond the "normal" supply constraints. It would make sense for those numbers to go up once they no longer needed to do that at the same rate.

 

[iroboto]

It's unlikely that Sony has a worse deal than MS when it comes to contracting with AMD/TSMC when it comes to the SOC used in their consoles. Espcially if you consider that in terms of volume, Sony likely sold as many or more PS4s per year than XBO's and Surface devices combined. And if you consider that Intel is used in more Surface devices, Sony quite obviously moves more AMD silicon than Microsoft does. So it wouldn't make sense that any contracts for the manufacture of PS5 SOCs would be worse than the contracts that MS has for XBS SOCs.

IMO, it's far more likely that supply issues for Sony when compared to MS is the supply of components or sub-components used in manufacturing a PS5. Further, I believe it's more likely a supply limitation in one or more of the custom components (liquid metal, the custom SSD chipset, etc.) that the PS5 uses. I say that as I can't see Sony being at a disadvantage compared to MS WRT sourcing and acquiring more generic industry wide components.

Regards,
SB

All azure data centres use epyc cpus. They spend billions on their data centre builds and have not stopped yet. This doesn’t include xcloud build out either.
Pretty sure Between MS and Sony, MS has access to significant discount bundling buying power. Their expenditures by sales amount aren’t even close.

iirc; MS monthly spend on azure data centres is equal to Sonys annual net profit.

 

[zed]

iirc; MS monthly spend on azure data centres is equal to Sonys annual net profit.

I dont know how that can be true, sony made $10.77 billion net profit last year (MS $60.6 billion net profit for comparison) you saying MS spends >$120 billion last year on data centers? (I couldnt find this info)
If so then what does google spend, trillions?

last year
MS revenue $161billion
Sony revenue $81 billion
MS assets $301 billion , if they're spending > $100 billion a year surely this would be much higher
Sony assets $238 billion

 

[iroboto]

I dont know how that can be true, sony made $10.77 billion net profit last year (MS $60.6 billion net profit for comparison) you saying MS spends >$120 billion last year on data centers? (I couldnt find this info)
If so then what does google spend, trillions?

last year
MS revenue $161billion
Sony revenue $81 billion
MS assets $301 billion , if they're spending > $100 billion a year surely this would be much higher
Sony assets $238 billion

https://www.crn.com/news/data-cente...ta-center-spending-by-amazon-google-microsoft
Hmmm perhaps I am wrong. I think the number I was looking for was around the 10-12B. Annual spend on data centres.

Though for some reason i was under the impression that Sony net profit was lower than this. Perhaps I got them mixed up with another company, or I was doing the math against SIE and not Sony.

 

[zed]

https://www.crn.com/news/data-cente...ta-center-spending-by-amazon-google-microsoft
Hmmm perhaps I am wrong. I think the number I was looking for was around the 10-12B. Annual spend on data centres.

I think thats the number of all the companies together worldwide

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I think thats the number of all the companies together worldwide

No, the number for companies worldwide was 37 billion for Q3...

Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft continue to lead the way in terms of Capex spending on data centers, followed by Apple, Alibaba and Tencent. The majority of the $37 billion spent in the third quarter of 2020 went toward building, expanding and equipping massive data centers.

And that's just 1 quarter out of 4. Total spend for the year was likely north of 100 billion for all companies combined (probably somewhere in the range of 105-120 billion USD).

This article from 2015 talks about MS spending 10+ billion USD per year building out Azure infrastructure.

Microsoft is spending more than $10B per year on Azure data centers (UPDATE) - OnMSFT.com

This article doesn't specify exactly how much MS is spending but it does indicate that spending for MS on Azure likely hasn't decreased.

Microsoft Will Build Up To 100 New Data Centers Each Year (crn.com)

It mentions that there are currently greater than 200 Azure data centers around the world and MS plans to build 50 to 100 new data centers annually. It also mentions that Amazon, Google and MS account for greater than 50% of worldwide data centers. So, greater than 50 billion USD spending by the 3 companies per year on cloud infrastructure.

So operating costs + new infrastructure buildout is likely much greater than 10 billion USD per year for MS. I'd guestimate that it's probably between 18-25 billion USD per year but could possibly be more.

Regards,
SB

 

[JPT]

To inject a couple of data points. The main problem is that demand for chips has risen. Companies only used to have stock for a couple weeks, but if a factory shutsdown/closes for a month then your SOL. So everybody tries to stock up.
Broadcom can only delivier 40% of the chips ordered. (Atleast for the chips i need)
TSMC have increased prices. Old contracts are being suspended until this situation is cleared up. Ie the stuff you wanted in 2022 and you have a contract for, it might come in 2023. If you want something in 2022 this is pur new pricelist with about 3x markup.
The main squeese is on chips at larger nodes, ie not SOC for consoles.
Also foundries have been running at very high percentage of capacity. Higher rhan they should if they wanted to keep up with maintenance.

The White house have about the same info i have
https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/25/22900987/chip-shortage-report-biden-commerce-secretary-raimondo

 

[dobwal]

It's unlikely that Sony has a worse deal than MS when it comes to contracting with AMD/TSMC when it comes to the SOC used in their consoles. Espcially if you consider that in terms of volume, Sony likely sold as many or more PS4s per year than XBO's and Surface devices combined. And if you consider that Intel is used in more Surface devices, Sony quite obviously moves more AMD silicon than Microsoft does. So it wouldn't make sense that any contracts for the manufacture of PS5 SOCs would be worse than the contracts that MS has for XBS SOCs.

IMO, it's far more likely that supply issues for Sony when compared to MS is the supply of components or sub-components used in manufacturing a PS5. Further, I believe it's more likely a supply limitation in one or more of the custom components (liquid metal, the custom SSD chipset, etc.) that the PS5 uses. I say that as I can't see Sony being at a disadvantage compared to MS WRT sourcing and acquiring more generic industry wide components.

Regards,
SB

AMD largest customer is HP. MS is their second largest customer.

https://csimarket.com/stocks/markets_glance.php?code=AMD