Despite there being a high demand all over the internet for Sony’s PlayStation 5, the company had reported a 14% drop in PS5 sales in its quarterly earnings. Sony has chalked up the decrease in sales due to the supply constraints – which in turn has led to a lack of hardware available for the public to purchase.
These results come from the FY2021 Consolidated Financial Results that Sony released to the public today, May 10th. You can see the drop in comparison to the same quarter of the last fiscal year, where Sony had far greater success. Despite the lack of hardware sales, Sony has managed to counterbalance this with DLC and digital software sales. But in that same breath, Sony has reported a decrease in sales for third party content.
Also within the earning results was the announcement of a 200 billion yen (approximately $1.5 billion) share buyback. Despite the company missing its estimates in Q4 2021, Sony must have great confidence in itself and its stock to do such a big buyback – after all, Sony has seen a 38.7% fall in its stock since its high in January of 2022. Sony will be picking up just under 2% of the currently available shares- which it will then be able to utilise throughout the year.
Once supply constraints lessen and materials are supplied in greater quantities, Sony will hopefully be able to push PS5 hardware sales up once again as demand is still there for the system – people complain about the PS5 being out of stock on a daily basis and how badly they want the console so they can play the best PS5 games.
If you wish to look at the FY2021 Consolidated Financial Results yourself, head on over to Sony’s Investor Relations site where all the information is available.