SONY, the world's second largest maker of consumer electronics goods, will not begin to sell its PlayStation 2 video game consoles in Japan until March, missing out on the key Christmas sales period.
However, the delayed launch of the console, in which Sony has already invested 120 billion yen (€1.1 billion), is unlikely to dent Sony's dominance of the video game industry and will not hurt earnings this year, which have been forecast without PlayStation 2 sales.
Sony expects to sell one million of its new version of the world's best-selling video game machine in the first week after its launch in March.
Sony's announcement this week comes amid intensifying competition in the industry. Sega has released its Dreamcast machine, the first to have a 128-megabit processor and Internet capability. Sega saw sales of $100 million (€96.1 million) on the first day of Dreamcast's US launch last week.
Nintendo plans to begin selling its next-generation console, the Dolphin, before Christmas 2000.
Mr Alan Bell, analyst at Schroders, said Sony might have opted for a later launch to avoid a shortage of software titles or consoles, such as that which plagued the launch of Sega's Dreamcast in Japan last Christmas.
Sony said 84 software titles were ready for sale alongside the console, which has a 128-megabit computer chip that is three times faster than Intel's Pentium III and will have the capability to play moving images, music and software downloaded from the Internet.
It will also be the first backward compatible console, enabling users to play PlayStation as well as PlayStation 2, and will use digital video disc (DVD) technology.
The game's price, at $368 (€353.5), was within expectations, according to Mr Akira Namegawa, analyst at ING Barings.
"In its first year PlayStation 2 will be a complete sell-out, because there are millions of game nerds out there," said Mr Bell. "The question for Sony arises in year two - whether they can generate enough software and whether that will be sufficiently successful.
"There's a pretty high hurdle and that's the enormous success of the current PlayStation," he added. PlayStation accounted for about 40 per cent of Sony's operating profits last year. PlayStation 2 will be released in the rest of Asia next summer and in the US and Europe next autumn.
