According to a report on the Forbes.com website,
Microsoft Corporation is on track to meet its fiscal year sales targets for the Xbox video game console after a strong holiday season, and it expects its Xbox Live online service to hit 1 million subscribers by the end of June, the company said on Thursday. Microsoft said it has sold 13.7 million Xboxes worldwide since the console’s November 2001 launch. It also stuck by a forecast for total sales of 14.5 million to 16 million by the end of June.

“I think mostly what has to happen to get to the high end of that range is that you have to have a lot of demand for software, really,” Chief Xbox Officer Robbie Bach told Reuters after the company reported earnings for the second fiscal quarter.

“The last two weeks of Christmas were a little stronger than we had expected, and the first two weeks of December were a little weaker,Things are pretty much in line with what we’ve expected since the holiday season.”

Xbox Live, launched in November 2002, has nearly 750,000 subscribers, Microsoft said. As opposed to leading competitor Sony Corp. , which sells hardware for online play on its PlayStation 2 but leaves operations and billing to individual publishers, Microsoft handles all of the Xbox Live servers and subscription access.

Bach said the 750,000 figure did not include people who got a two-month free trial for Xbox Live over the holiday season with the purchase of select games. Converting those trial subscribers, he said, was a priority in the early part of this year.

Strong Xbox sales are actually negative for Microsoft’s margins, since the company loses money on each unit of the console it sells. That loss is believed by analysts to have shrunk over the years, though, as the company has lowered manufacturing and component costs.

The next generation of the Xbox is expected to be released in 2005 or 2006, and speculation has run high that the company might release technical specifications on the new hardware at industry conferences in either March or May this year.
“The chatter meter is going to accelerate over the next six months,” Bach said, declining to address any specific plans.

Source: www.Forbes.com

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