Kaz Hirai targeting 150 million PS3s sold

In an interview with the Financial Times, Sony president Kaz Hirai revealed that he has set a target of 150 million PS3 units sold worldwide. Selling that many units is certainly a lofty goal, but Hirai isn’t referring to shipping that many PS3 in this generation of consoles. He’s going on the assumption that the PS3 will experience the same kind of long-term success that the PS2 is still having.

It’s not fun for me replicating the PS2 numbers. I’ve seen that movie already. I want to try to see if we can exceed the PS2 numbers after nine years, otherwise why are we in this business?

It has taken the PS2 nine years to pull over the 100 million mark, and as we were reminded several times during the Sony press conference at E3 this year, it will only get better whenever Lego Batman hits. Sony is projecting that the PS3 will have a total amount of 22 million consoles sold by the end of the fiscal year, which means that there is definitely room for the console to expand to meet Hirai's target.

At the end of the interview, Hirai also mentioned that he expects 467 billion units of Ridge Racer 7 sold by the end of the week. According the my numbers, the title is only shy a mere 2 billion. If only there was a way to cater to the intergalactic "core" market.

[Thanks, Brian!]