Sony to stop some PS3 shipments to Japan

Visitors play on Sony's PlayStation 3 game console at the company's display at the Tokyo Game Show in Chiba, east of Tokyo September 20, 2007. Sony Corp said on Thursday it would stop shipments of PlayStation 3 models with 20- and 60-gigabyte (GB) hard disk drives in Japan this month, focusing instead on the 40-GB model.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Sony Corp said on Thursday it would stop shipments of PlayStation 3 models with 20- and 60-gigabyte (GB) hard disk drives in Japan this month, focusing instead on the 40-GB model.

Sony said that this does not mean the 40-GB machine will be the only model available in Japan and that it will launch new models to respond to end-user preferences sometime in the future.

The 40-GB model, launched in November in Japan, sells for 39,980 yen ($364.5), less than the 20-GB machine's 44,980 yen.

Prior to the announcement, shares in Sony, which competes with Nintendo Co Ltd and Microsoft Corp in the global videogame industry, closed down 1 percent at 6,130 yen.

The Tokyo stock market's electrical machinery index IELEC. fell 1.4 percent.

(Reporting by Kiyoshi Takenaka)