Sony’s price cut will double PS3 sales
Sony Corp., the world’s biggest game- console maker, cut the price of the PlayStation 3 in the U.S. by $100, or 17 percent, responding to the widening lead of Nintendo Co.’s Wii and Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360.
A PlayStation with a 60-gigabyte hard drive will sell for $499 starting today, part of a push to double U.S. sales, Jack Tretton, head of Tokyo-based Sony’s U.S. games unit, said in an interview. An 80-gigabyte model goes on sale in August for $599.
Lower prices will allow Sony to target potential buyers of Microsoft’s $479 Xbox 360 Elite model to increase sales and narrow losses at the PlayStation unit, analysts said. Nintendo’s Wii, the top-selling console at $249, probably won’t be affected. Sony also will have 100 new games available by the end of the company’s fiscal year in March, Tretton said today.
“The price cut is unlikely to help the company dramatically expand its market share,” Seiichiro Iwamoto, who helps oversee the equivalent of $809 million at Mizuho Asset Management Co. in Tokyo. “There is still a large price gap.”
U.S. consumers have purchased 1.38 million PlayStation 3s since it was introduced in November. That compares with 2.84 million Wii players, which reached stores the same month. Microsoft sold 5.5 million units of the Xbox 360, introduced a year earlier, according to New York-based NPD Group Inc., which tracks sales.
“A lot of sales that would have gone to the Xbox Elite will go to PlayStation” after the price cut, Richard Doherty, an analyst at the research firm Envisioneering Group in Seaford, New York.
Microsoft is struggling to lift Xbox sales amid an “unacceptable” number of repairs made under warranty, the company said on July 6. Glitches in the Xbox 360 console will cost as much as $1.15 billion to fix, Microsoft said.
Sony said in May that higher sales and lower production costs will help reduce losses at the game division by almost 80 percent this fiscal year to 50 billion yen ($405 million) after a record loss. President Ryoji Chubachi said as recently as July 6 that Sony had no plans to cut PlayStation 3 prices.
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forgot to mention that the 60gig ps3 will no longer be sold, its going to not be manufactured by sony any more so thats why they lowered the price, not to try and get more sales, but to trick ppl into buying it cheaper then pull the plug on it so that the ppl who just bought the 60gig model wont get ‘too’ mad aahaha sony, just burying yourself into a bigger hole each month
“they lowered the price, not to try and get more sales”
Correct me if I’m wrong but that statement makes little to no sense.