I am lost. What has this got to do with the PS5pro?
They think that Sony did discount PS5 Slim, PSVR2 and PS Portal to sell/clear the inventory they had. So the SIE inventory should reduce, but they saw that instead the inventory increased.
But their approach is wrong: they are comparing Q1 vs Q4, when they should compare this Q1 vs the Q1 of the previous year. Because console companies mostly manufacture stuff across the year and get their stuff mostly sold in Q3 (Christmas season), manufacturing and sales aren't spread equally across the four quarters of the year.
Their inventory has been decreasing when analyzing it properly (comparing it vs previous year), and Sony made the discounts and reduced inventory because having a smaller inventory reduces the costs of having stuff sitting in warehouses.
But they mistakenly think the inventory increased, and they assume because Sony is secretly manufacturing PS5 Pros.
They also forget that Sony keeps manufacturing PS5 Slim, PSVR2, PS Portal and the rest of many accesories and games they produce and that goes to their inventory. I think if they plan to release it in Q4 and have moderate sales as PS4 Pro did (Pros are expensive products for a pretty small portion of the users, same as the most expensive GPUs in case of PC), they may start to produce it in Q3 or maximum Q2, not Q1.
AMD is only taking about their gaming revenue (Consoles and GPUs) and I don't think they would lie to investors.
AMD's gaming revenue nosedives 48%, not expected to recover until 2025 — lack of interest in RDNA 3 coupled with fewer console sales
"First quarter semi-custom SoC sales declined in line with our projections as we are now in the fifth year of the console cycle," said AMD CFO Jean Hu on a conference call with analysts and investors (via SeekingAlpha). "In gaming graphics, revenue declined year-over-year and sequentially. We expanded our Radeon 7000-series family with the global launch of our Radeon RX 7900 GRE and also introduced our driver-based AMD Fluid Motion Frames technology that can provide large performance increases in thousands of games."
"[The] gaming segment, based on current demand signals, revenue to decline by significant double-digit percentage," said Hu. "[…] Based on the visibility we have, the first half, both Q1 [and] Q2, we guided down sequentially more than 30%. We actually think the second half will be lower than first half. That is basically how we are looking at this year for the gaming business."
If PS5 Pro was launching this year, revenue for AMD would stop deciding as Sony would be buying up more chips (PS5 + PS5 Pro) since the first half of the year for a PS5 Pro November release.
Imo, best time to release the PS5 Pro is along side GTA 6. The marketing as well would be straight forward. "The best place to play".
Most people will wait until GTA 6 drops before buying a PS5 Pro anyway, as that's probably how Sony sees it.
PS5 Pro may not even have been scheduled to be released this year. We are just following and believing what Tom Henderson says.
I think PS5 Pro sales will be a relatively small portion of the PS5 sales, as happened with PS4 and PS4 Pro.
As AMD says, they are approaching the 5th year of the console generation, and each generation yearly console hardware sales normally peaks around its 2nd-4th year. Meaning, after that peak each year the console hardware sales decrease, so this double digit decrease is normal independently of if they release the Pro or not.
I think PS5 Pro and GTA6 will cause both a temporary bump in sales, both relatively very small when looking at the whole picture.
From different sources seems that they are really working on a PS5 Pro, but the only source we have for a release date window is from Tom Henderson which also came with PS5 Slim and PS Portal info that ended being true, so unless they later did some changes (something possible) the PS5 Pro part is also pretty likely true. Obviously can be wrong too.