So, less than 40%, eh? And yeah, I'm talking calendar years; I figure it's easier than everyone trying to keep track of everyone's fiscal years, especially when discussing them head-to-head.
Okay, so do you have XB2 shipments from Q2 and Q3 2013? That, with the YOY drops, should give us a decent idea of how much XB2 shipped in 2014.
What really gives it away is the fact AMD uses the word "end user". That word just isn't up for debate as retail can never ever be an end user.
Sure, and she also used the term "shipped," which isn't up for debate, because it means sold in to retail. This is different from sold through to end users, another term she was using just prior to saying shipped. So if she was talking about sell-through, then why not keep calling it that? Or why not just say sold? Why use the term that means sell through if you mean sell in? If she's using terminology interchangeably, it seems unsafe to choose a given usage and say, "
This is there she actually knew what she was talking about." Your argument is, "30M sold to end users," is perfectly clear, and I agree; it's just as clear as, "30M shipped." Both statements are just as clear as they are contradictory. Don't forget, AMD's product actually sells through twice; in to Sony, through to Amazon, and through once more to me. So do AMD look at Amazon as "the real customer" in much the same way that Sony sees me as the real customer? Again, clear as mud.
Like I said, she may have meant sell-through, but if she did, then her rounding seems to have given us a uselessly high cap on the Bone's sell-through, so again, the whole thing seems kinda useless to us as is. Knowing that XB3 shipments are <10.3M would be incredibly informative, but knowing that sales are <11.5M doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know. In fact, the latter just expands the Realm of the Possible to 8.7M-11.5M, giving the impression that the XB3 may have sold even more, but Lisa's rounding doesn't retroactively go back and create demand for the Bone in Germany, Japan, and Finland. See what I mean?
Really, it seems like our best option for guessing at XB3 sell-through will be to wait until we have shipments from Sony, so we can calculate their unsold units. Then we can take that number and try to estimate MS had unsold, given retail musings. (e.g. more units than Sony; fewer units; roughly the same.) Once we say, "If Sony had X unsold, it's likely MS had Y unsold," then we can subtract Y from whatever we guesstimate for their shipment numbers to get a triple-guesstimated sell-through figure. lol
AMD just needs to read Sony's (or Microsofts up to Q1 2014) financial reports to find out how much APU shipments were ahead of console shipments in past quarters. Also don't forget that AMD earns royalties on Xbox 360's Xenos GPU, which makes the numbers transparent for them despite Microsoft reporting only combined shipments.
I was wondering about something like that myself. Do you have any more information on that arrangement? I was wondering if maybe AMD received payment from Sony and MS for every APU shipped. That's would explain why they could confidently say in their own report, "Our customers have shipped X." If that's the arrangement, then it makes sense that AMD can and would talk about console sell in. They wouldn't necessarily have access to sell-through data, but hey, most of that is publicly available anyway.