TOKYO — Sony President Ryoji Chubachi defended the company's manufacturing technology in an interview, attributing a string of production glitches to the growing demands wrought by the shift from analog to digital technologies.

"I don't think that Sony is largely inferior to other companies" in production technology, Chubachi said Thursday (Dec. 14).

Chubachi attributed a string of embarrassing production glitches this year to an accelerating manufacturing environment. "With the shift from analog to digital, the environment of production has changed," he said. "The clock started turning around faster than in the past. That deprived us of time and processes to fully investigate troubles and get feedback."

Sony President Ryoji Chubachi

He noted that Sony is not alone in facing manufacturing challenges. "We have to catch up to the changes as quickly as possible, but in some areas, we have not yet done so," Chubachi acknowledged.

Following a massive recall of lithium-ion battieres, Chubachi appointed Makoto Kogure, Sony's corporate senior vice president, to oversee product quality and safety.

Referring to delayed blue laser production, the Sony president said "it was a fact that blue laser production was the bottleneck of Playstation 3 availability. Laser production has now reached the planned level. We have no intention to revise the target of shipping 2 million units of Playstation 3 this year and 6 million units by the end of March next year," he added.

Sony has invested ¥500 billion (about $4.2 billion) on semiconductor technology over the last three years. "The investment was mainly for semiconductors used in game consoles. Now that PS3 has been launched, the investment will shift from PlayStation to expand production capacity to meet demand for component devices such as displays and image sensors," Chubachi said.

The focus of Sony's chip investment was the Cell processor, which was developed for the game machine, among other applications. "We are going to recoup the [semiconductor] investment through the game business," he said.

Sony established a Cell development center last year to work on new applications. "It takes time to use the Cell processor for consumer electronics products since it was developed for the game machine." Sony "engineers are investigating potential new applications for the Cell processor for consumer products and also industrial products."

"With the launch of Playstation 3, the game business has increased in significance" at Sony, Chubachi said. He predicted that sales for Sony Computer Entertainment will be boosted by PlayStation 3, but added that its has to "develop a global marketing strategy to enrich software and reduce the cost of hardware" development.