Sony is confident that the supply chain issues it has had with the PS5 are now solved and it expects to sell 25 million units in 2023, driven by strong sales in the holiday period.
This is excellent news for the gaming industry, however, the current malaise in consumer spending and coming into a holiday season where spending is likely to be subdued in many countries, our assessment is that Sony may fall a little short of its target.
The CNBC article stated:
“This holiday season is the first holiday season we will be fully stocked on PlayStation 5 in every geography,” Eric Lempel, Sony’s head of business operations said in an interview earlier this week.
That comes after a series of successive console shortages, because of which many players around the world were unable to get their hands on PS5 units. Poor supply volumes linked to the global chip shortage and supply chain disruptions greatly limited the availability of PS5, and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and S.
SAR Insight tracks the games console market in its Device service and our current estimate is that the total market will ship almost 50 million units in 2023 and Sony will achieve a substantial market share. If it can achieve close to its 25 million target the PS5 will beat all previous records for annual shipments of PlayStation consoles, beating PS4 shipments in 2017. Nintendo will still hold the record for the highest annual console shipments, which it achieved in 2020 with the Switch.
In the future we expect growth to be driven by sales of handheld gaming devices, such as the Nintendo Switch and many others entering the market. A trend that Sony seems to be expecting too with the upcoming launch of Project Q.
Get in touch if you would like to learn more about the games console market or would like to access our market data.
