"Sony Corp. may have missed its goal of having 400,000 PlayStation 3 consoles in U.S. stores for the video-game player's Nov. 17 debut, analysts said. The number of machines available was 'even lower than expected,' Kaufman Bros. Equity Research analyst Todd Mitchell said today in a research note. Analysts including Michael Savner at Banc of America Securities and Anthony Gikas at Piper Jaffray & Co. also predicted a shortfall," according to Bloomberg.
More than half the 150 stores checked by Kaufman Bros. said they wouldn't have enough units to cover preorders, according to a Nov. 16 research note by retail analyst SooAnn Roberts. She predicts Sony will ship no more than 200,000 units to the US this year. Savner said in a Nov. 7 report that Sony would miss its target. Gikas said in a Nov. 16 note that he expected 200,000 PlayStation 3s available at the U.S. launch and 400,000 by year- end.
Comment: If the analysts are right, these are silly amounts. So far, Sony has "launched" in the Japan and the US with a number of machines that would be more suitable for Canada. Is it really going to go through with a farce of a European launch or announce now a delay until November 2007 or even March 2008?
Sony said it would do a global launch, and went back on that. It mocked Microsoft for doing two models and then did exactly the same thing. It said the PlayStation 3 was cheap and then cut the price for the Japanese launch. The whole operation has been a shambles pretty much from top to bottom.
Come on, Sony, how about saying what you are going to do and then actually doing it, instead of screwing it up?
