NPD's December totals show that Sony sold through 1.36 million PS3 units in the U.S, which was the best month ever for the console. According to Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia, the PS3 is keeping its momentum in January. In advance of NPD's January data (expected February 12), Bhatia said that Sony’s PS3 "will have the best year-over-year growth in January among all consoles."
Meanwhile, he believes that Wii sales are hurting because of a hardware shortage, which is affecting overall totals for January. "...our checks show Nintendo’s Wii console is currently experiencing meaningful shortages. We view this as temporary but expect it to have negatively affected January hardware sales," he said. Sterne Agee's channel checks revealed that just 28% of the stores they called in January had the Wii in stock. GameStop did fare better, however, as 47% of GameStop's stores had the Wii in stock.
Bhatia did not say much about Microsoft's Xbox 360, but he did note that GameStop's special Xbox 360 promotion (free $50 gift card), which ran for one week, benefited sales for the console. Bhatia believes this GameStop promotion was supported by Microsoft.
Overall, Bhatia expects software sales in January to be flat, or at worst down five percent.
2 Comments
April 21, 2010
No i think the analyst means that there are not enough devices to deliver to the stores and thats the reason the wii is sold less. But i agree that the sony is a lot better then the wii
buitenkeuken
May 27, 2010
This is like comparing apples to oranges - they're the
same type of thing but completely different. The slow down in sales was due to the Wii shortages but since this article was written Wii sales have picked up again considerably.
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