Sony on track to sell 15 million PS3s, company says

Sony is on target to sell 15 million PlayStation 3 game consoles in the business year through March 2011, a company executive said on Wednesday.

"Sales at the end of the year are as we expected," Executive Vice President Kazuo Hirai, who also heads the company's games unit, told reporters at a roundtable in Tokyo.

Sony is banking on its new Move motion control system to help boost PlayStation 3 sales to 15 million from 13 million in the previous business year.

Both Sony and rival Microsoft, with its own motional control system, Kinect, are trying to topple Nintendo from the games industry's top spot. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

Sony said Nov. 30 it had sold 4.1 million of its Move game controllers to retailers worldwide in the two months since its launch.

That puts it roughly on a par with Microsoft, which said in late November it had sold more than 2.5 million of its controller-free Kinect video game systems worldwide only 25 days after launch. Its target for the year is 5 million.

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Hirai's comments come days after a fellow Sony executive said Sony's LCD TV sales would likely fall slightly short of a targeted 60 percent rise in unit terms this financial year.

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Hirai also said Sony was considering building PCs that used Google's Chrome operating system.

Separately, Sony said on Wednesday that it would expand its video-on-demand service to music content in its latest bid to rival Apple's iTunes service, with plans to immediately start the service in Britain and Ireland, followed by France, Italy, Spain, Australia and New Zealand in 2011.