Sony Says to Meet PlayStation 3 Shipment Targets

by Anton Shilov
12/23/2006 | 07:26 AM

An executive of Sony Corp. said that the company has solved production issues with Blu-ray lasers and the company will be able to meet shipments goals of the famous PlayStation 3 game console. If the company manages to ramp up manufacturing of the PS3, then it will not have to delay the launch of the console in Europe, as some assumed earlier.

“With the PS3 the bottleneck has been availability of blue lasers, but now production of those has been launched in volume. We did take time preparing ourselves, but as of today we have reached our target production rate. Based on projections for this year we will reach [the PS3 shipment targets],” said Ryoji Chubachi, Sony president and chief executive officer of the electronics business, in a briefing with reporters at its Tokyo headquarters, reports Reseller News web-site.

Mr. Chubachi said that despite of relatively slow ramp of PlayStation 3 manufacturing, the company would be able to ship two million game consoles this year and six million of the PS3 consoles by March, 2007.

Executives at Sony Corp. have so far been optimistic about the PlayStation 3 production, sometimes, in a very empathetic way. Nevertheless, the real situation does not seem to be too good for Sony. According to NPD group, Sony sold 195 thousand PlayStation 3 game consoles throughout November in the U.S., whereas in Japan sales numbers were about 188 thousand, according to Media Create agency. If the numbers are correct, then the combined amount of PlayStation 3 shipped worldwide in November was 383 thousand, less than 500 thousand that Sony promised to make available for the launch on the first day.

Relatively high pricing of the PlayStation 3 amid low availability of new-generation games that take advantage of the PS3 already reduced consumer interest towards the new console that Sony sells at a huge loss of several hundreds of U.S. dollars, according to some estimations. Still, broad availability of the new console is crucial for Sony and the desired production rate is a good news for the company.

Sony PlayStation 3 console is based on the Cell processor developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, the RSX graphics chip by Nvidia Corp. and will be equipped with Blu-ray optical disk drive. There are two versions of the PlayStation console available: one is equipped with 20GB hard disk drive and priced at $499, another features 60GB hard drive, card reader and some other improvements and is offered for $599.