According to a report from Reuters, Sony is planning to ship 2 million PlayStation 3 game consoles to the US by the end of March with hopes of resolving the shortage issues by May of this year.

Despite rumors of PS3’s sitting idle on store shelves, a Sony executive cited that some areas of the country still had no consoles on their shelves months after the initial release. “It’s a testament to the fact that we’ve been able to manufacture and ship units on a greater pace than any previous console,” said Jack Tretton, chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment America in the report.

This statement seems contradictory to a recent study showing that the PS3 console was bringing up the rear in sales recently in the new generation of game consoles, falling behind Sony’s own PS2.

“Our goal is to fill shelves across the United States. Our goal is not to have empty shelves, it’s to have full shelves. If we have empty shelves, that’s one less consumer who could have bought a PlayStation 3,” Tretton said.

The PS3 sells for $500 to $600 depending on the features which include different hard drive capacities and has a built in Blu-ray disc player which adds a fair amount to its value since Blu-ray players alone are relatively expensive compared to the game console. January saw Sony sell 244,000 PlayStation 3 consoles while Xbox 360 sold 294,000 and the Nintendo Wii sold 436,000. Sony’s Playstation 2 sold 299,000 units during the same time period.

Sony stated that it is has a target of shipping 6 million Playstation 3’s worldwide by the end of March.

Reuters