Moore: Microsoft May Exceed 10 Million Xbox 360 Goal

Author: by Staff

According to a new interview with Microsoft vice president Peter Moore, the company is increasingly confident of making its goal of 10 million Xbox 360 consoles sold worldwide by the end of 2006. In a brief Bloomberg News interview, Moore was asked whether Microsoft is likely to beat the 10 million console goal, and replied: "Yes. All indications are that we came off a very strong Thanksgiving holiday." However, he declined to give a new forecast. Moore also took a chance to reference the hardware shortages both and for Nintendo's Wii and for Sony's PlayStation 3 (which also suffers in terms of hardware cost when compared to Xbox 360), commenting: "The key is we're in stock, we're available, we're delivering well to retail... Certainly the consumer is recognizing the fact that we have a great price point as well as 160 games available and that flies in the face of our competition." As for other indications of the company's progress, as recently as yesterday, Microsoft's CFO Chris Lidell was simply re-iterating the company's "We also believe we can sell 10 million Xbox 360 units by the end of the Christmas season." But exactly how units have been shipped thus far? Microsoft's latest financial report at the end of September revealed that the company had moved 6 million Xbox 360s worldwide. And in his latest analysis, Wedbush Morgan's Michael Pachter said NPD data that Xbox 360 hardware sales in the U.S., one of the largest markets, were 2.9 million units, averaging approximately 250,000 units monthly for the last six months. However, Pachter further predicted that 750,000 Xbox 360 hardware units would be sold in November, and between 1.5 – 2 million units in December, what he considered a conservative estimate assuming that PS3 supply levels remained consistent throughout the month leading up to Christmas. Further concrete information for the U.S. will be available in the November NPD report, which should debut on Thursday, December 7th.