Sony has run into supply chain troubles with the upcoming PlayStation 5, reports Bloomberg. The Japanese electronics giant is said to have ramped down its production estimates by 4 million due to manufacturing issues with its upcoming gaming console’s custom-designed system-on-chip.
Sony was earlier expected to produce about 15 million units of the PlayStation 5 for this fiscal year but that figure has now been brought down to 11 million. People familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that production yields, a metric manufacturers use to determine how many of the produced units are ready to ship against the number of defective ones, for the PS5’s revamped processor are as low as 50%, a relatively under average result. While this figure is reportedly improving, it has yet to reach a stable level.
Incidentally, Sony had boosted PS5 production by about 50% earlier this year in anticipation of the holiday season demand and the rise in gaming as more people, while sheltering at home, look for new avenues of entertainment.
Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad said, in a tweet, that even though production issues such as this are fairly normal especially at the beginning of a console launch, it does “seem more severe than expected.”
It’s also worth noting that this supply chain snag likely won’t affect PS5’s sales in the initial months. Its effects will be more prominent later in 2021 depending on the demand and whether Sony manages to up its production yields in time.
In an earlier rumor, Ahmad claimed Sony will ship PS5 stock to the U.S. by air instead of sea, a more expensive decision to speed up shipments and meet retail demand.
Sony is hosting a virtual event on Wednesday, September 16, where it’s expected to announce PlayStation 5’s price and release date. The company began accepting pre-orders for the new gaming console late last month.
The Sony PlayStation 5 offers 8K gaming and 4K gaming at 120Hz thanks to a new eight-core AMD Zen 2 CPU, a custom AMD RDNA 2-based GPU, and 825GB of SSD storage — that together can produce 10.28 teraflops of power, nearly double that of its predecessor, the PS4 Pro’s 4.2 teraflops.
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