Sony PlayStation 3 Delay Helps Rivals

By Tony Glover, The Business, London

Mar. 19–Games console makers are gearing up to exploit the delayed launch of Sony’s long-awaited PlayStation 3. The launch, originally scheduled for this month, will now go ahead in November.

After Sony announced the delay last week, Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, lost no time in claiming it would put Microsoft’s Xbox 360 in pole position to become the world’s top gaming console.

“In every other generation, the first guy to 10m consoles was the number-one seller in the generation,” Ballmer told Fortune. “Did we just get an even better opportunity to be the first guy to 10m? Yeah, of course we did.”

But Microsoft’s rollout of the Xbox 360 last Christmas had its own problems and has encouraged speculation Microsoft may still not be able to capitalise on the delay of PlayStation 3 to the extent Ballmer anticipates.

Shortages of the Xbox 360 meant the company sold 600,000 systems from its launch on 22 November to 31 December, far fewer than market analysts predicted. There are still reports of a production bottleneck as a result of difficulties with an unnamed component vendor, but Microsoft still hopes to sell 5m by June.

Previous PlayStation models outsold competitors by a wide margin. According to UBS, last year Sony sold 101m Playstation 2 units, while Microsoft sold only 24m Xboxes and Nintendo sold 21m Gamecubes. Sony sold 1.4m PlayStations in December, after the Xbox had been launched.

But the delay of the new PlayStation, alleged in some reports to have been the result of disk drive problems, has given Microsoft an opportunity, providing it can put its production difficulties behind it. This is particularly true of markets in France, Italy, Spain and Japan, where the Xbox has not traditionally performed well.

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