Xbox Series X/S’ arrival last week marked Microsoft’s biggest console launch ever, according to Xbox boss Phil Spencer, and stock for both machines is, as you might imagine, currently in short supply – a situation that Xbox’s chief financial officer Tim Stuart has now suggested will likely continue into April next year at the earliest.
In response to query a regarding Microsoft’s plans to meet demand for Xbox Series X/S, Stuart – speaking at the Jefferies Interactive Entertainment Virtual Conference (as spotted by IGN and transcribed by Seeking Alpha) – admitted, “I think we’ll continue to see supply shortages as we head into the post-holiday quarter, so Microsoft’s Q3, calendar Q1.”
However, Stuart predicts Microsoft’s supply chain will be going “full speed heading into kind of the pre-summer months”, and that the second quarter of the year – Microsoft’s Q4, between April and June 2021 – would be when “the supply profile [begins meeting] the demand profile”.
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“We’ll have supply cranking over the next, what, 4, 5, 6 months,” said Stuart, “And that’s when I expect to see really that demand profile start to be met, which will be really, really great…I think we’re going to start to see some real velocity kick up, which I’m really excited to see.”