Sony Ships 1 Million PS3s in N. America

January 07, 2007


Are we worried about strong sales of the Wii or Xbox 360? Not really

In an important early look at the pivotal holiday sales season, Sony Corp. said it met its goal of shipping 1 million PlayStation 3 consoles to North America in 2006 despite ongoing production problems with the still hard-to-find video game system.

The figure is about half of Sony's stated goal of 2 million PS3s globally by the end of 2006. The company did not disclose a global tally in the announcement, made at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Sony has dominated previous rounds of the console wars with the PlayStation 1 and 2, but it is still undecided who will grab the lead this time around _ the PS3, or its two chief rivals: Nintendo Co.'s Wii and the Xbox 360 from Microsoft Corp.

The PS3's launch had been delayed in the United States from the spring to November, yet supply problems were still evident when it went for sale on Nov. 17.

The company ended up selling 197,000 PS3s on launch day, less than half of the 400,000 it had initially forecast. The market research company NPD Group estimated that U.S. consumers bought 476,000 Wiis in the two weeks following its Nov. 19 launch.

Sony officials have attributed the limited supply to manufacturing glitches with blue laser diodes, the technological heart of the system's high-capacity, high-definition Blu-ray disk drive.