Huge Quantities Of PS5 Consoles Are Being Tracked For Black Friday And The Holidays
It's frustrating to fathom that nearly a year after the latest generation game consoles launched to retail, they remain as difficult to obtain as ever. Unfortunately, that is not likely to change in the near future. However, if you're looking for a bit of positive news on the situation, it's this—Sony is purportedly stuffing multiple jumbo jets full of PlayStation 5 consoles and shipping them to retailers in time for Black Friday, and the overall holiday season.
This amounts to a massive restock effort for the holidays, or at least 'massive' in terms of the shortage that keeps lingering on, and on, and on, and...you get the idea. What that amounts to is 130,000 PS5 units crammed into three Boeing 747 planes, en route to Europe. It's not clear how many are bound for the US and other territories.
That's according to The West News, which also claims Sony is spending a whopping $7 billion delivering these consoles in time for Black Friday and Christmas. There's no way that figure is correct—the outlet is probably conflating Sony's rumored participation in a joint venture between it, the Japanese government, and TSMC to expand production by building a new chip plant.
According to a previous Nikkei Asia report, the total investment in the project is around 800 billion Japanese yen, which is the equivalent of a bit over $7 billion in US currency.
In any event, it's said Sony has already sold a million PS5 consoles in Europe, and these latest jumbo jets full of consoles is part of a broader and unprecedented effort to get more systems in the hands of eager gamers. So at least for some, it's going to be a very happy holiday season.
As we have done in the past, we will continue to monitor the situation stateside and report on any upcoming restocks that we're privy to. They do happen on occasion. For example, Walmart on Friday restocked the PS5 and Xbox Series X for online purchases, and that will almost definitely not be the last time it does such a thing. So be sure to check HotHardware daily.
