The PlayStation 5 might cost more shortly, even though by this point, we’d typically expect a small price cut…

In April, Sony increased the price of several of its consumer products in Japan (cameras, Blu-ray players, home cinema systems, headphones, speakers) due to a shortage of semiconductors (chips) and other external factors that have contributed to higher prices for raw materials, manufacturing and distribution. For this reason, it is no wonder that during the last fiscal quarterly report (April-June), Sony received a question about whether the company plans to do something similar with the PlayStation 5.

VGC translated the answer from Totoki Hiroki, Sony’s chief financial officer. Still, unfortunately, he only gave the usual evasive answer (there’s nothing concrete to say about it at the moment), but be prepared for Sony to raise the price at some point. A few days ago, Reality Labs announced that it was increasing the price of the Quest 2 VR headset, formerly Oculus and now under the Meta brand, by $100 due to increased manufacturing and shipping costs.

In May, Forrester analyst Glenn O’Donnell told CNBC that he predicts a 10-15% price increase for chips, causing prices of PCs, cars, toys, consumer electronics, appliances and many other products to skyrocket: “Chipmakers face their increasing supply issues that are exacerbated by the Ukraine war … and demand remains high while supply remains constrained. Energy prices are also on a tear, including electricity. Chipmaking requires an enormous amount of electric power. Margins are already tight on such products, so they have no choice but to raise prices.” Syed Alam, Accenture’s global semiconductor lead, added that “products using more advanced chips, such as GPUs and high-end CPUs, are likely to become more expensive.”

Totoki expressed during the financial report that not enough PlayStation 5s were shipped in the previous quarter (we wrote about it recently): “There were two big constraints that we were imposed with. One was the parts and components availability. The other was the supply chain. With the availability of parts and components, there are many improvements, so we are very hopeful and quite optimistic about that. We took quite a hit in the first quarter for supply chain disruption. In the first quarter, hardware volume for sales was quite smaller than we expected at the beginning of the year, so supply chain disruption is something that we hope will be completely addressed.”

So don’t be surprised if the PlayStation 5 suddenly becomes something like 550 or 600 dollars… if not more.

Source: VGC