Sony's US president admits PS3 not being manufactured yet

Allocation of consoles has not been decided yet

21 August 2006 10:35 GMT / By Amber Maitland

Sony Computer’s American president, Kaz Hirai, has let it slip that manufacturing of the PS3 hasn’t started yet.

With a November 17th launch date looming, Sony apparently still has quite a way to go in building up its stock of consoles.

Hirai, in an interview with Gamespot UK, said that “everything’s pretty much on track”, and “all signs are good to go”.

However, he also said, “We haven’t started manufacturing yet. Some of our ops guys were actually just in China, and also in Japan just reviewing the production lines and everything else".

“But they are, again, preparing as we speak to get the manufacturing going."

“We’ve not announced and we haven’t set really a specific date to say, ‘As of this day we’re going to start manufacturing'.”

He also admitted that Sony don’t expect to be able to keep up with demand, calling it a “logistical impossibility”.

Sony has allotted the number of units to each territory yet, and Kirai explains, “I think that we’ve always talked about shipping 2 million units worldwide within the calendar year".

“Since we’re going with three territories, we really haven’t come up with an allocation just yet."

“But even if you do the simple math, you’re talking about less than 700,000 units per territory, per major territory, between launch and the end of the year.”

According to Kirai, a final line-up of launch titles hasn’t been agreed yet, because Sony wants to feed games to consumers piecemeal, to “keep the portfolio fresh”.

Via Gamespot UK