| Yojimbo said: Vgchartz is spot on if Sonys "America" is the same as Vgchartz. |
I think these are just SCEA shipments, SCEA only recently started distribution in Latin America a few months ago, prior to then it was done locally. I think the "North America" shipments on Sony's corporate site actually also include South America (technically it doesn't fit in any column), as Koller had this to say about PS1 sales in an interview about PS2 hitting 50m in NA:
But on Sony's corporate site the figure given for PS1 in NA is 40.78m.
SCEA's site hasn't even been updated yet to reflect the fact that they now cover Latin America:
In November SCEA spoke about their Latin American plans:
And after offering slideshow perspectives on Sony’s market share, and assurances that the company is in line with its goal of selling 10m PS3 units for the fiscal year, Mr Jackson moved straight onto detailing Sony’s plans for the PS2, its success, and plans for it to mushroom in Latin America.
“We are going into our ninth Christmas with the PS2. Never been done with a console manufacturer in the history of the industry. Nine years in, and PS2 is still on the shelf this Christmas and is still selling very well, and as a matter of fact in a tight economy, is a great value proposition for the consumer,” Jackson said, adding that sales of the eight-year old console will sell on the “high side of 3.5m units in north America” by the end of the fiscal year.
But North America is not Sony’s biggest plan for the PS2. Later on in his keynote, Jackson detailed the company’s three-phase plan for selling the establishing the console in Latin America.
“The significance of the Latin America market is huge,” said Jackson. “Obviously from a population standpoint I don’t think it’s a big secret that this is a huge opportunity. We will put a number of resources in place to cater to that market.”
The idea makes perfect sense for a company whose PS3 sales are struggling in the three biggest international markets. The inexpensive PS2 could be an ideal entry-level product for many areas of Latin America, and the potential there is massive. “Obviously just based on the sheer size of [Latin America], the number of countries there and the size of the population, long-term it has a very good opportunity to be bigger for SCEA than the Canadian market was.”
“We’re now launching there. There are countries in Phase 1 Latin America that we’re aggressively gong after, and they include Chile Argentina, Columbia, and Peru.” Phase two of Sony’s push into Latin America is scheduled to begin this month, with the console being distributed to Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama and Venezuela.
Phase three targets are Uruguay, Paraguay and of course Brazil. “We’ve identified that the Brazilian market as probably the biggest market opportunity for us, and that will be the third part of our launch which will take place over Spring 2009.”
It seems most likely that these are US & Canadian shipments, and possibly Mexico too (I'm not sure if Mexico was covered by SCEA prior to their recent move into the rest of Latin America). Of course, there wasn't really any need for me to type out all of this as he clearly stated "in North America", but they don't always say what they mean, the numbers of times I've seen SCEE say Europe when they really meant PAL territories is a good example.
