Sony expects PS5 to break its annual console sales record next fiscal year

Sony has reiterated that it plans to sell a record number of PlayStation consoles during its next fiscal year.

The company intends to ship more than 22.6 million PS5 consoles during its FY2022 (the 12 months ending on March 31, 2023).

If achieved, it would beat a 24-year-old console sales record set when the original PlayStation shipped 22.6 million units in FY98.

PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan revealed the PS5 sales target during Sony’s investor relations day in May, and Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida reiterated it during the company’s general meeting of shareholders on Tuesday, according to Japanese news agency Jiji.

PS2 recorded an annual sales peak of 22 million units in FY02, PS3 of 14.4 million units in FY10, and PS4 of 20 million units in FY16.

Sony hopes to ship over 14.8 million PS5s during its current fiscal year ending in March 2022, which would surpass the number of PS4s sold to retailers during the older console’s second year of availability, but the company has admitted it could struggle to hit the goal due to challenges caused by supply chain issues.

Sony has reportedly told analysts that it expects PS5 consoles to be in short supply until 2022.

“I don’t think demand is calming down this year and even if we secure a lot more devices and produce many more units of the PlayStation 5 next year, our supply wouldn’t be able to catch up with demand,” CFO Hiroki Totoki said at an analyst briefing in May, according to Bloomberg.

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Publicly PlayStation is offering a more hopeful outlook on PS5 supply. “We’re working as hard as we can to ameliorate that situation,” Ryan also told Wired last month.

“We see production ramping up over the summer and certainly into the second half of the year, and we would hope to see some sort of return to normality in terms of the balance between supply and demand during that period.”

Totoki said in April that Sony was considering various solutions to help it cope with global chip shortages, including potentially altering hardware designs or sourcing secondary suppliers.

Sony will reportedly start production on a PS5 hardware redesign in 2022. That’s according to Taiwanese business website DigiTimes, which claims that suppliers including semiconductor foundry TSMC are planning to start producing the redesigned PS5 console between the second and third quarters of next year.