Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., the No. 1 maker of game consoles, said it may not deliver the planned amount of the PlayStation 3 (PS3) gaming consoles by the year end and by March, 2007. The company seems to still blame limited amount of Blu-ray disc components for its problems.

Sony earlier said it would only be able to ship 400 thousand of PlayStation 3 game consoles to the U.S. and 100 thousand to Japan for the launch in November, 2006. During the whole calendar year 2006 the company aims to distribute, according to news reports, two million new-generation consoles, two times less than anticipated. But the company does not seem to be sure it would meet its “targets”.

“The honest answer is it’s more of a target for PlayStation 3 shipments. Clearly we’ve had production issues,” said Jack Tretton, co-chairman of Sony Computer Entertainment America, in an interview with Bloomberg.

Sony already blamed poor Blu-ray laser output for inability to supply sufficient amount of PlayStation 3 consoles in November, but the firm hoped to more or less resolve the issues later during the year and achieve the goal of shipping 6 million PS3s by March. However, it now transpires that the company is incapable of doing so, even though the firm does announces its “shipments targets”.

In addition, only Asustek Computer is expected to be the major assembler of the PlayStation 3 in Q4 2007, while with Foxconn Electronics will only ship PS3s to Sony starting from February and March 2007, according to the Chinese-language Apple Daily cited by DigiTimes web-site.

Besides the ability to ship a sufficient amount of consoles, it is also unclear how the insufficient yield will affect the building costs of the console, which are already very high.