PSP Shipments Drop 75%

January 31st, 2007, 01:10 Posted By: wraggster

via ign

Everyone and their DS-playing mom knew this already, but Sony has at last admitted to not making its worldwide shipment targets for the PlayStation 3 in 2006. As part of its third quarter financial report covering 10/2006 to 12/2006, the company announced today that worldwide shipments in 2006 for the new hardware capped off at 1.84 million units, short of the promised 2 million.

North America got most of those units, at 1.03 million. Japan got 810,000 units, with numbers climbing up past a million in the first few weeks of January.

The company is still aiming for 6 million units shipped by the end of March. By then, the PS3 will have launched in Europe.

Other Sony gaming hardware saw declines compared to the same period in the previous year. The PS2 shipped 4.11 million units, down by 23% from last year's 5.36 million units. The PSP shipped 1.76 million units, down by 72% from last year's 6.22 million units.

In software, PS3 saw shipments of 5.2 million units for the year. PSP saw an increase of 24% over the previous year, hitting 21.2 million game titles. PS2 dropped 16% from the previous year, with 78 million games shipped.

All the lowered shipments along with the PS3 launch caused some dark figures for Sony's games division. While sales for the quarter rose 5.6% from the same period last year to 442.8 trillion yen, operating profits dropped sharply from a gain of 67.8 trillion yen last year to a loss of 122.0 trillion yen this year.

The company expects to stop taking losses on PS3 hardware in the next term, Sony CFO (chief financial officer) Nobuyuki Oneda announced at the financial briefing. One means of doing this will be through smaller chip sizes. The company has already started manufacturing CELL chips using a 65 nanometer process, Japan's IT Media reports.

Even with a turn in fortunes on Sony's hardware losses, don't expect a price drop any time soon. Oneda said that Sony is not consdering a price drop right now, although something could be possible in 2 or 3 years.

In response to that massive drop in PSP shipments for the quarter, Oneda said that Sony will not be giving on the platform, repeating past promises that a number of ideas are under consideration.

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