Microsoft plans Euro-Xbox launch

Microsoft plans to make no less than 1.5 million machines available across Europe in the first three months of its Xbox launch.

The game consoles, set to roll out on March 14, will compete against Nintendo's GameCube and Sony's PlayStation 2.

Sandy Duncan, Microsoft's vice president for Xbox in Europe, said the company is capable of building 1.5 million units for the launch. Duncan was present in Sarvar, Hungary at the opening of one of the Xbox's main manufacturing plants.

The facility belongs to Microsoft's manufacturing partner, Flextronics, which produced consoles for the North American market, along with its sister site in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Flextronics said the facility will be able to produce more than 15,000 consoles a day.

The software giant was estimated to have had about 300,000 Xbox units available when the device went on sale this month in the US. Most of those units sold out within the first few days, according to a retail survey by Goldman Sachs.

Microsoft has said it will ship 1 million to 1.5 million Xbox consoles to stores by the end of the year. Similarly Nintendo, which also said almost all the retail units sold out within the first week, said it would ship 1.3 million GameCubes before year's end.

The US video game industry generated $4.3bn in revenue in the first nine months of 2001, up 34 per cent from the same period a year ago.

The numbers from NPDFunworld, part of research firm NDP Group, did not include the launch of Microsoft's Xbox or Nintendo's GameCube. The researchers said the two new consoles would likely drive the industry to a record year, surpassing 1999's $6.1bn in US revenue.