I would like to see the sales numbers in January as a comparason

Originally posted by bryston:

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I would like to see the sales numbers in January as a comparason

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In the business and marketing world you don't compare 4th quarter sales and 1st quarter sales. It is well known that around 50 percent of all hardware and software sales of home video products occur in the 4th quarter of the calendar year - October to December.

This is the reason why you compare Q4 of 2007 to Q4 of 2008 OR Q1 of 2008 to Q1 of 2009. In January everyone expects a big drop-off from the busiest buying season of the year. It doesn't make sense to compare Q4 2008 to Q1 2009.

You need to follow seasonal sales trends and compare same quarters year-on-year. This applies not only to BluRay but also to most goods - flat panel HDTV's, digital cameras, and I suspect women's boots as well.

So what you are saying is that the heavily weighted sales of the forth qtr is not indicative of average monthly sales. In essence, the spike seeen in this news report is a spike. When averaged over 12 months, the sales numbers are more normalized and will appear less impressive.

Jo

Originally posted by bryston:

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So what you are saying is that the heavily weighted sales of the forth qtr is not indicative of average monthly sales. In essence, the spike seeen in this news report is a spike. When averaged over 12 months, the sales numbers are more normalized and will appear less impressive.

Jo

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Correct. Everyone sees a sales spike during Q4.

BluRay and DVD may be a special case though since home video is a content-based product. We may see spikes when highly anticipated titles are released. Case in point - this year we saw sales spikes on both formats when they released Transformers, Iron Man and TDK. It just happened that the Iron Man and TDK releases were in Q4. In general, however, we see an increase in overall baseline sales during Q4.




If you want to compare 12-month figures i.e. BluRay revenue for 2007 vs what he have so far in 2008, here are the numbers:
(From Toshibot's post in another thread)

Total BluRay revenue in 2007 - $172.8 million
Year-to-date BluRay sales revenue thru 12/14/2008 - $540 million

That a >300 percent increase in revenue.

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What's amazing is the fact that these sales spikes are happening in the middle of a recession.

Originally posted by bryston:

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I would like to see the sales numbers in January as a comparason

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One thing that could happen in January is what they call the "Christmas Tree Effect."

ad reported strong sales of BluRay players during Q4 especially during Black Friday weekend.

http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/16262.cfm

If a good number of these players were given as gifts then we could have a substantial increase in the BluRay buying population, not to mention new PS3 owners. This could translate to increased sales during the first few weeks/months of next year.

Originally posted by Toshibot:

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What's amazing is the fact that these sales spikes are happening in the middle of a recession.

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Suprising about the sales spike on blu-ray ofr just in general?

Uh, it is Xmas, so the increase in sales is normal for this time of year.

165% more of almost nothing is still almost nothing and I'm afraid I don't see anything too spectaculr about the 462,000 Blu-ray discs sold either.

Obviously the Iron Man spike - a movie almost as tailored to the PS3 gang as Batman TDK.

Considering how many PS3s there are supposed to be in circulation I don't call those numbers especially amazing.