PS3 may not make year-end 2 million production mark [update 2]

Bloomberg is reporting that the PS3 year-end shipment projection of 2 million units (with 1mil to 1.2mil tagged for North America) may not be possible. Sony says there is a parts shortage for the Blu-ray disc drive, so production is running behind previous forecasts.

Our favorite Sony exec, Jack Tretton, chimes in saying, "Sony Playstation 3 is in full production and our target quantities for North America remain unchanged. Sony Playstation 3 will launch on November 17, 2006, in the U.S. with 400,000 units on store shelves. We plan to have more than one million systems in North America by December 31, 2006 and six million units shipped worldwide by March of 2007." "The honest answer is it's more of a target ... clearly we've had production issues."

This news comes on the heels of Sony's statement of financial issues resulting from battery recalls and price cuts of the PS3 console in Japan. Those who made pre-orders shouldn't be impacted, but gamers trying to get the console for the holidays may have an even tougher time than anticipated.

[Update: 1) Sony's Kaz Hirai told Gamespot yesterday, "

All the [production] issues have been ironed out, now it's just a matter of being able to replicate the process to as many lines as possible -- which is going to help you, obviously, get as many units as possible [emphasis ours]." So what Jack meant was that earlier production issues, which have since been ironed out, may have impeded their abilities to make the initial launch "target." Thanks, Miniboss!
2) Looks like Bloomberg screwed up the "production issues" quote. According to Sony, "The reference to production issues is to the previously announced delay of shipments in Europe from November 2006 to March 2007."
3) We will restate that this has no impact on the 400,000 launch day number.]