Sony Corporation (NYSE: SNE) has announced that it has shipped one million Playstation 3 consoles in the U.S. from the day it launched in late November 2006 to the last day of the calendar year. Early reports said that Sony -- which was plagued with supply issues that forced it to make fewer initial consoles than it had hoped -- would sell only 800,000 consoles by year's end. So, it shipped over a million -- but how many sold?

Right now, the Playstation 3 is hard to find at stores and online. Nevertheless, Sony's shipments of one million PS3 consoles in the U.S. fulfilled half of its goal to ship two million PS3 consoles worldwide in 2006. Sony did not break out numbers to say how many global units it had sold in 2006 -- it just reported U.S. numbers shipped this time around.

Sony reported that it sold 197,000 PS3s on launch day, less than half of the 400,000 it had initially forecast. With the Microsoft Xbox 360 already on the market for a year and with the Nintendo Wii selling 476,000 consoles in the two weeks following its November 19 launch -- two days after the PS3 launched -- is Sony headed for a huge disappointment? I doubt that, but 2007 will be an interesting time for its CEO, Sir Howard Stringer.