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SCEA: Latin America Market is Next
SCEA’s vice president of sales Ian Jackson was a little more explicit about his promoting intentions at the BMO Capital Markets Interactive Entertainment Conference yesterday, going into a 20 minute speech which detailed why Sony had reasons to be cheerful about the success of its hardware and software sales.
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.”
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Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court 30 Monmouth Street Bath, UK BA1 2BW
England and Wales company registration number 2008885
Well, the Latin American Market has been treated in a completely different way for a long time. In Brazil you can still buy the megadrive or the even the mastersystem in updated versions for around US$ 80 in the retail. I think sony nintendo and microsoft could make a good profit here, if they would launch there consoles to comparable prices to the western world, and offer some good on line futures and digital distribution of their games at prices around US$ 30. At least here in Brazil only the richest 10% tend to buy this old games in a store at prices you can get all the good new ones in Europe. Brazilians love to participate in online communities so to make them pay get them where they like it! And please, stop to treat Latin America as a junk yard for 20 years old systems. People loved the megadrive, but they would rather like to be able to play it s classics on the virtual console.
This is positive in anyway, even if piracy is driving videogaming "business" over here. Because we need a legal alternative too. Over here no one cares if the games are stolen or not. If there's a direct participation from the big companies we might see some decent efforts to slow it down at least.
* Sorry, but this is a bad joke. The PS2 is imported in Brazil for years. Because Sony Brasil never care to officially lunch the videogame, the price of original games are much expensive (you would pay U$100 for a old PS2 game?). This incentived much more the piracy. Now, official PS2 will have a hard time competing against PS2 with mod chips.
The PS3, otherwise, have a good potencial, because is new, piracy don´t exists, and people like play online with friends. But probably the stoneage brains of Sony will "lunch" PS3 in spring of 2019. But it´s ok, imported consoles are more cheap. Only make credit card with Brazil address be accepted in PS Store, so we can give money in exchange for games.
Living in Canada, I had no idea we were considered a big enough market to even be compared to. We're certainly not in the US, UK or Japan size. We don't even get headline billing above smaller markets like Australia, or the infamous "the rest of Europe." Glad know there's at 1 market that can look up to us in sales targets.