Nine months after its release, the PS5 is still surprisingly hard to find, and the worldwide shortage of semiconductors seems to be the main cause. However, there is some good news on the PS5 restocking. Sony has now officially secured enough of the elusive chips to meet this year's sales target for the PS5.

This is great news given that Sony hopes to sell nearly 15 million consoles in 2021, and bad news given that the company has already sold out most of its planned inventory.

This information comes from Sony's quarterly earnings call (via Twinfinite). Sony's CFO, Hiroki Totoki, spoke about the semiconductor shortage and how it relates to the PS5 in particular: the PS5 has sold more units than the PS4 in the same relative time period, but it is an incredibly rare product that is restocked infrequently and sells out in minutes.

In short, the PS5 is a rare commodity.

In short, Sony intends to sell 14.8 million PS5s by the end of the year. Moreover, the company has acquired enough semiconductors to do so. There is one problem with this plan, however. During the conference call, Sony also confirmed that it has already produced 10.1 million PS5s and sold about 10 million units in 2021.

That means, depending on how you do the math, Sony has already produced and sold two-thirds of the PS5s it plans to produce and sell this year. On the one hand, this is not a problem, since this year is about two-thirds done. On the other hand, this means that the timing of PS5 restocking will not improve much. Unless Sony decides to drop millions of PS5s at a time, which seems unlikely.

Nevertheless, the year is not over yet and, all else being equal, Sony wants to sell as many PS5s as possible. If demand remains constant and the next 4.7 million PS5s are not eased, Sony could try to secure more chips for an even larger resupply. But semiconductors are still relatively scarce and in demand for everything from cars to washing machines; securing 5 million chips probably would not have been easy, given that Toki confirmed that selling PS5 hardware would still not be profitable for Sony. It probably wasn't even cheap. (But it should be in the future, he added.)

On the other hand, there are clearly people who will buy the PS5. These numbers will eventually reach a tipping point, but that will depend on how many people overall want the PS5. For example, the PS4 has sold more than 115 million units over the past eight years, so it could still be some time before the numbers stabilize.