How many

Along with PS3 New Zealand Pricing & Release Dates, another area of interest for New Zealanders as they watch the shenanigans in the US around the PS3 launch, is; “how many PS3’s will we be getting?”

This was prompted by a discussion I had with my wife last night. I was explaining the xbox 360 vs PS3 competition, and the results of the shortages of PS3’s etc etc. After mentioning that there were only 80,000 in Japan and 400,000 (possibly 150,000) in the US she made the astute observation:

“So it would be like us only having one hundred in New Zealand.”

“Exactly.” I responded, and immediately wondered, “how many are we getting?”

After some frenetic googling this morning, I’m sorry to say that I haven’t been able to come up with any concrete data, though I will keep trying. So, here’s what we know:

Official Channels: “The previously announced PLAYSTATION 3 shipment forecast of 6 million units globally within the fiscal year ending 2007 is not changed.”

Common Knowledge: 2 Million by end of 2006 (though that may be in some doubt).

Heresay (comment on a gamespot news article): Daniel123x: As for launch quantities, before the delay I was told by an EB employee that Australia would be getting less than 10,000 units at launch (this was after I preordered so he wasn’t trying to scam me… more). Mind you, this was before the delay, so the number will have most likely changed. Still, 10,000 for 22 million people… and the Americans are complaining about $600 and 400,000 units. We get $776US and 10,000.

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A note on that last one. “The delay” they’re refering to is the move of the launch date from November to March for Europe et al.

So…

We have Sony saying they will ship 6 million units within the fiscal year ending 2007. Almost everyone has interpreted that wording as being synonymous with the calendar year of 2007. But engadget states that Sony’s fiscal year ends on 31st March 2007. I looked at the annual reports to confirm this and everything refers to 31st of March.

So, is Sony saying they’re going to ship 6 million units before the end of March (including the early March Europet et al launch)?

That’s hard to believe.

Anyway. If they were, we could deduce that if they hit their 2 million 2006 target, then they’re going to produce 4 million in the remaining three months. I doubt the US and Japan’s demand will be fulfilled by this point, so the best case scenario is for another 2 million of the 4 to be sucked up by US and Japan, leaving 2 million for the second launch.

Europe has a population of 726 million people. Australia has a population of almost 21 million and New Zealand has 4 million. So if we’re giving out PS3’s according to population, that would be 96.7% to Europe, 2.8% to Australia and 0.5% to New Zealand.

According to our optimistic previous predictions, that would be 1,934,000 for Europe, 56,000 for Australia and 10,000 for New Zealand.

Now, Sony seems to like cutting estimates by half, so if we cut all our figures by half we might get a more realistic estimate. That would leave 28,000 for Australia and just 5,000 for New Zealand.

Now I have very little idea what the demand for PS3 is like in New Zealand, but that number for Australia would certainly seem to be low.

I guess only time will tell, but I wouldn’t be waiting for a price drop wherever you are in the world.