Despite reporting a 29 per cent slump in operating profit for its second financial quarter ending September 30, Sony had a strong year in its PlayStation division. In its earnings report, the company announced it sold 4.9 million PlayStation 5 units, up from 3.3 million units in the first financial quarter, which brings the total PlayStation 5 lifetime shipments to 46.6 million units as of September 30th. Despite facing supply chain issues at the launch of the PS5 in 2020, the company eventually ramped up and announced earlier in July that it had sold more than 40 million PS5 consoles globally.
Sony’s target is to ship a total of 25 million PlayStation 5 units, and it is hoping the newly released slim version of the console will help achieve the sales target. In an interview with CNBC, Senior Vice President and Head of Global Marketing at SIE, Eric Lempel said this would mark the first year that the PS5 is “fully stocked” following the production challenges in 2020 and 2021.
“We launched [PS5] back in 2020,” Lempel told CNBC. “We suffered from the same supply chain issues that everybody was dealing with. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to deliver PS5 to every consumer that wanted one.”
The recently released Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 has proven to be a “big hit,” Sony says, and it is now the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game in history. The game sold more than 2.5 million copies in its first 24 hours of release and now sold more than 5 million units as of October 30th.
