Sony has enough PS5 stock for 2026, but consoles could face 'big impact' to price if trends continue

Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki tells investors that PlayStation console prices could be adjusted if hardware manufacturing costs increase, but the company has enough console supply to meet demand throughout the remainder of the year.

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In a recent earnings call, Sony management briefly discusses the PS5's volatile pricing situation that, in part, led to Q4'25 delivering the lowest quarterly shipments off Sony's ninth console generation.

The company's CEO was quite frank on the realities of the hardware market, indicating that the PS5 could get more price hikes if component scarcity keeps squeezing the market.

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"Of course, memory prices going up would increase the cost of the BOM, so the cost of manufacturing would go up. If that leads to passing on costs to prices, there would be a big impact on the gaming console prices," Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki said in the earnings call.

Totoki says that enough component stock has been allocated to produce console volume in accordance to Sony's estimates.

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"As we explained earlier, for calendar year 2026, the necessary volume has been secured, and we have, to a certain extent, agreed on the price itself. We would like to strike a balance between profitability and our promotion budget. That cost is already factored in."

Totoki goes on to say that Sony is not yet ready to price out the PlayStation 6 and will instead carefully observe how the industry responds to ongoing RAM shortages.

While Sony has not telegraphed how many PS5 consoles it expects to ship throughout FY26, the group does say it expects to sell less PS5s in FY26 than it did in FY25.

This will have a negative drag effect on sales, which are expected to drop to 4.420 trillion yen, but a boost in first-party game sales (games like Wolverine and Saros) is expected to help offset this. It looks like Sony is expecting big volume for Insomniac's new comic game.

Profitability remains intact for the FY26 period, which ends in March 2027. After that, it's implied that Sony will start trying to estimate and pricing out a BOM for the PS6, however the company does note in its report that operating income will

"We plan to base our PS5 hardware sales in FY26 on the volume of memory we can procure at reasonable prices and we expect hardware profitability to be essentially the same as FY25."