Math, do you know it?

If you’re a journalist in australia or the analyst that he’s quoting, then maybe not. 


Sony to lose 560mil?

I’m not sure about laptop battery costs, but for the second of the analyst’s claims…

In addition, a decision to slash the price of the PlayStation 3 in Sony’s strong home market will cost a total of US$220 million, the analyst predicts.

Hmm, Lets start with the amount of the price cut. There were 100,000 PS3’s destined for Japan on launch day. The price cut was equal to about $100 USD. This comes out to about $10 milion USD.that’s 1/22nd of what the analyst claims. Sony has said that before the end of the year (The timeframe the article talks about) that they will ship a total of 2 million worldwide by the end of the year. 400k of these are destined for the US for sure, 100k for Japan for sure, the remaining 1.5 million are unknown.

If all of these had the price cut, and all of these went to japan, this would bring the total to a mere $160 million USD. That’s still well short of the $220mil predicted. The other issue is that this discount is ONLY on the low end model of the PS3. It has been stated before that 80% of the PS3’s released this year will be the high cost model. This reduces the pool to have a price reduction by 4/5ths. That’s only $32 million USD. If the remaining 1.5 million are split evenly between US and Japan, then the total will only be $17 million USD.


The amount that it is likely to be is about 8% of the amount the analyst predicted.

Analysts either don’t pay attention, or they’re inept at mathematics. Which is it in this case? It’s almost as embarrassing as when the “truth” people gave a “every 8 seconds” figure alongside a “400,000 per year” figure…