Despite shipping over 11 million units, Sony’s PS5 sales still fell below expectations

Sony announced results for its 2021 fiscal year ending March 31, 2022, noting that PlayStation 5 sales didn’t meet company projections.

According to Sony, it expected to sell 14.8 million PS5 units for the year, but instead only sold 11.5 million, falling short of its projections by 3.3 million units – which Sony predicted could happen.

Sony attributed the missed projection to the contining chip shortage. That said, since its release, Sony has managed to move 19.3 million PS5 units.

In the game and network services segment, hardware sales were up 9.5% year-over-year (yoy) to ¥840 billion ($6.4 billion). Add-on content and software declined 2% yoy to ¥1.42 trillion ($10.8 billion), while there was a 6.8% uptick in network services to ¥409 billion ($3.1 billion).

The game segment as a whole saw sales increase by 3% yoy to ¥2.74 trillion ($21.06 billion), with an operating income of ¥346 billion ($2.6 billion), which is up by ¥4.4 billion yoy or 1.2%. The increase was attributed to improvements in the profitability of PS5, despite the impact of lower sales of non-first party software.

For the fiscal year 2022, Sony plans to increase development expenses in order to strengthen first-party software at its existing studios by approximately ¥40 billion ($307.5 million) yoy. Its unit sales forecast for PS5 is 18 million units, a number based on the company’s current visibility into parts procurement.