0.002% of Taiwan to get a PS3

by Justin Murray { Nov 16th 2006 at 7:30AM }

Yes, the PS3 is in very short supply. We're going to have to camp out days in advance; most of us will be told our wait was for naught (except maybe a $60 discount on a 360 game). As bad as we have it, Taiwan will have it worse.

According to Sony Computer Entertainment Hong Kong (SCEH), Taiwan will be getting a whopping 500 units. Taiwan has 23 million people according to the CIA Factbook; this means .002% of the population will get a PS3. For comparison, Japan has 127 million people, which translates into .06% of the population getting an opportunity for a PS3. Even if the US only gets 200,000 units as some predict, Sony will get the PS3 in .07% of the population's hands.

Count your lucky stars you're not in Taiwan; they're going to have the toughest time getting their hands on the difficult-to-find machine. We're confused, however, as to why Sony chose to do this. What exactly will selling a paltry 500 units do? They would have been better served staying in Japan and holding off on a Taiwan launch until production numbers picked up. It isn't exactly a major battleground in the war between Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft.

Tags: PlayStation, PlayStation 3, Playstation3, PS3, Sony, Sony PlayStation 3, Sony PS3, SonyPlaystation3, SonyPs3

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

HotShotX @ Nov 16th 2006 7:50AM

What exactly will selling a paltry 500 units do?

Two words: Field Advertising.

~HotShotX

Kayzai @ Nov 16th 2006 7:59AM

1. What exactly will selling a paltry 500 units do?

SONY WILL BE ABLE SAY .....OUR PSFREE IS SO GOOD, WE SOLD OUT!!!

Next, SONY PSFREE SOLD-OUT IN BRAZIL. Amount launched 28.. i.e, 1 for each state. LOL

Publishers who who went exclusive with PS3 are going to learn a very brutal lesson. I can already feel them trembling.

Multi platform is the new black. Thanks to Sony

Kn1ves @ Nov 16th 2006 8:12AM

Theyre helping the people that buy the PS3 to sell on Ebay. Gives 500 people the taste of the PS3, then the rest of the population will go online and buy their console there.

http://illusivedesigns.net/kn1ves

Pixelbox @ Nov 16th 2006 8:23AM

I live in Taiwan. Sony is pretty big here, although the 360 has gotten a huge advertising blitz this past year. The tech and game stores are really pumping it. Wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft walks away with this game market. (And it's not as small as many would believe.)

raimo @ Nov 16th 2006 8:32AM

that 0.002% is still unlimited times more than in europe. so the taiwanese are the unlucky ones, eh?

minus_273 @ Nov 16th 2006 8:51AM

hahah that flag probably just got joystiq banned in communist china.

Todd @ Nov 16th 2006 9:55AM

I'm honestly surprised there haven't been riots. I'm sure there have been some grisly crimes somewhere, either murder or just outright violence, for the sole sake of getting a PS3.

Proud day for Sony.

josh @ Nov 16th 2006 9:58AM

400 THOUSAND units / 250 MILLION PEOPLE in the U.S. is .0016%
and btw... not everyone wants a ps3 in the u.s. and the same goes for taiwan...therefore u cant use the whole population as ur deciding factor because u dont know how many people want one!

James @ Nov 16th 2006 10:00AM

You know, I find this marketing tactic truly troubling. I know from my academia that differentiated products (those products with a high amount of quality and features) really account for only up to 25% of most populations. The only exception are those areas with a rather large base income. Anyway, It would appear that Sony is only applying themselves to approximately 5% of the population as a total. And they aren't even producing the amount of products to even handle that. They are more likely to handle only 1%. That's a lot of untapped market. If they don't tap into it, they will lose shares because of negative feedback and the like. But then again, these numbers right off the top of my head, so I may have gotten this wrong.

But here is the disturbing part. Taiwan, and most of the rest of Asia, has very few people that may even be able to get such a system at that price. So, even if they managed to sell the systems, what's to guarrantee that they will keep such a base?

Fan loyalty? That only gets you so far before they feel betrayed by either price hikes or shortfalls.

Advertising? You know, any amount of advertising is good. But the more people see advertising, the more they get sick of it.

The only way they could even make sales at this moment is to get their product known and accepted. The problem is they have the inability to continue a streak of profitable goods, much less compete against heavy competitors. When you have multiple, POWERFUL competitors, you must be willing to commit massive resources to compete against them. With these tactics, it would seem they have slowed down sales dramatically. This translates into enormous economic difficulties if they can't produce a product that can at least cover costs. And since they can't produce a new product that cannot at least do this, they have serious trouble. Worse, they have no reliable contingency product to help them financially to alleviate the costs.

This leads to these conclusions:
1) Sony MUST produce a product that is able to compete in the market, let alone sustain its position there. Sony currently lacks that ability.
2) Their differentiation strategy relies on being able to sell enough of a given product at enough of a price to at least break even. With this given strategy, they do not have enough product to sell, nor is it enough for a profit. To just break even, they would have to raise the price. That would put considerable strain on their market share that is already waning. Therefore, they must go against their current strategy and cut costs of production.
3) Of all this information, Sony must regain one thing: Market sustainability. They have no considerable place where they have enough of a market share to be considered competitive. Neither Taiwan, the U.S., or any other country where they are conducting business. This must change for them to survive.

Outside of these lines of thought, there is one last item that is off topic. Why didn't Sony use a target cost when developing their product? It wouldn't have been hard to do and it would have saved them so much trouble.

In any case, good luck Sony. You'll need it.

ackmondual @ Nov 16th 2006 10:57AM

from #4
""I live in Taiwan. Sony is pretty big here, although the 360 has gotten a huge advertising blitz this past year. The tech and game stores are really pumping it. Wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft walks away with this game market. (And it's not as small as many would believe.)""

I second that. I went to my cousins' house to visit many relatives there about back in '96. It was just before Final Fantasy 6 (3 in US) was to be released. I got to see a very nice preview on their Super Famicom system since the Jap version was already released in the Asian market for some time there. Actually, I got to see the bosses, ending, high level pyrotechinc spells, and even see how badly a L64 party whoops ass whatever gets thrown at them.

Taiwanese folks may have to resort to the Jap version of games, and heck my cousin's with FF6 would've actually preferred to have gotten their hands on the English version of it, but parts of that counrty does have their share of wealth and keen interest in vid games. I do hope the paltry 500 units goes up to a more mainstream # in the future, as I do with all the rest of the world.

32_Footsteps @ Nov 16th 2006 11:47AM

"400 THOUSAND units / 250 MILLION PEOPLE in the U.S. is .0016%..."

Josh, you'll want to adjust your math. First, 400 thousand divided by 250 million is .0016 - but you have to multiply by 100 to convert that to a percentage. Thus, that number would be 0.16%

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. had over 281 million as of the last official census, in April of 2000. All reasonable estimates actually put the population at a hair over 300 million now. This means that 0.13% of the US population will be able to get a Playstation 3.

Except there's a further monkey wrench in that number. Sony didn't distribute 400,000 units to the United States. They shipped 400k units to North America - so Canada's population needs to be accounted for as well. Canada is actually undergoing a census right now, but we have their 2001 numbers, in which they had over 30 million residents. If we assume Canada had approximately the same amount of population increase proportionally as the United States, that'd put their population at about 32 million.

So if you take a look at that, barely more than 0.12% of North America is going to get a Playstation 3, and that's if the most recent Sony numbers are correct. This would be proportionally 60 times as many Playstation 3 units going to North America than Taiwan, and proportionally almost twice as many as Japan.

Meanwhile, Europe wants all of us to drop dead.