BKK2 said:
Faxandu, I don't think you understand his point. In south America a lot of consoles are imported unofficially. These consoles are bought from retailers in US and therefore show up in NPD data etc as sales, but won't count as South American sales, even though they are sold to consumers in South America.
The situation is similar here in Thailand, PS3s are imported from Hong Kong, so all are sales will be tracked to Hong Kong until it's officially released here. 360s come from Korea, so Korea gets Thailand's sales attributed to them. I made a mistake earlier, I don't think Wii has been released in Hong Kong yet, so the majority of them come from Japan, but a minority come from US, so all those countries get consoles which were sold in other countries attributed to them.
This is the point he was making about South America, the majority of sales are grey imports, so are already tracked in US and not South America. The sales of official 360s and Wiis (PS3 hasn't been released in that territory yet) are probably a lot lower than cheaper grey imports. Official imports have to pay import tax, well connected importers don't, at least that's how it is here in SE Asia, and from my trips to South America I don't see much difference between the two regions. Corruption is king.
I'd really like to see 360 and Wii software sales in South America, my guess is the attach rate is close to zero. PS3 won't launch there until the hardware is profitable, as it's impossible to cover hardware losses with software sales.
PS1 and PS2 launched within a year of Japan here in Thailand, this time it's well over a year and they still have no plans to release the PS3 yet, but PSP has been out long time already as the hardware turns a profit. For those interested in when the PS3 hardware will turn a profit, an easy way to tell will be when it's released in either Malaysia/Thailand/South America. This is why Wii will launch in China ahead of PS3, whilst Nintendo never paid any interest before, and Sony always launched there alone. |
Actually now would be the perfect momment to launch PS3 in South America, since it has no piracy whatsoever. People already buy PS3 in Brazil and are importing a rather considerable ammount of games (hardcore gamers). The few people that does not use piracy with X360, sometimes prefer to buy games released here rather than import ones - even though importing can be cheaper due to gray marketing.
And Sony can always launch the system here at a profitable price as MS does in its secondary markets. The X360 pack that is sold here for U$ 1400 is worth, at most, U$ 430 in USA. Taxes don't go as far as 3x the original price (although they can go past 2x). I think MS profits here, even if it just 0,2% of its total profit. And helps marketing a lot.
I think Sony is losing badly in the secondary markets: one for not having an official launch, two for not having piracy.
