Sony Corp, the world's second-biggest consumer electronics maker, may outsource its production of the PlayStation Portable (PSP), possibly to Taiwan or China, to meet rising demand for its first handheld video-game player, the president of the video games subsidiary said.
"We have to somehow increase our production capacity as we're not prepared to start selling in Europe. We've run out of units in the US and it's still selling well in Japan," Sony Computer Entertainment Inc president Ken Kutaragi said today at a games industry meeting in Tokyo.
Sony in February said it was aiming to more than double monthly production of the PSP to 2 million units by this summer to compete with Nintendo Co, which holds about 90 percent of the handheld game market with its GameBoy and DS devices. The Kisarazu factory in Chiba, east of Tokyo, is the only facility that makes Sony's PSP console. The factory makes about 1 million units a month, Kutaragi said.
"We're making the key components here, but we're looking to expand assembly of the product outside of Japan," Kutaragi said.
He said China and Taiwan were two possible centers from which the company could manufacture.
Sony expects to ship 12 million units of the PSP this fiscal year. The company, which started selling the device in Japan on Dec. 12 and in the US in March, had shipped 2.97 million units as of March 31. Nintendo, which was to report full-year earnings yesterday, said it probably shipped 6 million DS players as of the end of March. The DS has two screens, unlike most handheld game players, and allows users to control games by touching one of the screens.
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), Taiwan's biggest electronics company, won an order to make PSPs for Sony, a Chinese-language newspaper reported yesterday. Hon Hai will assemble the PSP and begin shipments to Sony as early as July, the newspaper said, citing several foreign analysts.
Hon Hai declined to comment on the report and a Sony spokeswoman said nothing had been decided on moving assembly abroad.
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