Sony has announced that it has reached 40 million sales of its PlayStation 5 (PS5) console to consumers. The target was reached in the week ending July 16th, 2023. The availability of Sony's latest console has improved significantly over the last 9 months, which has allowed the company to satisfy a wave of pent up demand for the console, leading to record breaking shipments of PS5 in early 2023.

Previously, Sony announced PS5 sell-through of over 30 million at the beginning of January 2023. With sales to consumers of over 9 million in the first half of 2023, this performance is 30% more than PlayStation 4's (PS4) best performance in the 1st half of a year, underlining the huge demand there has been for Sony's latest console. The pace of sales is allowing Sony to close the adoption gap when compared to the previous console generation, making up for poor availability of the PS5 in its first two years on sale.

PS5 reaches the 40 million sales milestone at a slightly slower rate than the PS4 and is currently tracking around a million consoles behind in terms of cumulative sell-through. While it originally appeared that stock shortages would delay PS5 adoption by around 6 months or more compared to the PS4, sales performance in 2023 has improved the situation significantly. 

In terms of sales performance moving forward, there remains some unknowns in relation to an expected normalisation of demand, versus the very strong pent up demand as more consoles have become available. Ampere will be watching closely through Sony's fiscal Q2 and heading into fiscal Q3 to see how rates of adoption are trending. Overall, the current sales performance puts Sony in a good position to achieve its fiscal year shipment target of 25 million PS5s, but we'll know what will be achievable with more clarity in the next few months. Ampere is currently forecasting PS5 sell-through of around 21 million units in calendar year 2023.