Is China only a piece of cake in the world console market?

In my blog it was mentioned that I saw 3 PSPs on my way to office. It is really an interesting question: how many PSPs have been smuggled into China?

I decided to do some micro investigation on my way home tonight, by counting the number of PSP in my subway train. The result was: I saw 12 PSPs, out of some 360 passengers in 6 carriages.

Despite that some people might have put their PSPs in bag, there were still 3.3% passengers having PSPs in hands. Nowadays, Shanghai subway system is carrying over 3.8 million passengers per day. According to Shanghai Traffic & Construction Commitee, subway carries 25% of passengers in Shanghai. Considering that most people are taking public traffic to work (2 ways), there could be some 7.5 million actual passengers. We don't see significant difference between subway passengers and bus passengers yet. So my rough estimation is: there could be some 250 thousand PSPs have been sold in the grey market of Shanghai.

According to China offline game distribution network, Shanghai is only 7 or 8 percent of the whole map. That is to say: probably some 3 million PSPs have been smuggled to China. Most of these PSPs come from Hong Kong of Asia region, where Sony just announced PSP recorded 11 million units in total sales in Feb 2008.

My improvisational investigation tonight was too rough to give an accurate number for smuggled PSPs. But once someone go along streets in the downtown here, he would agree that 3 million PSPs - worth some 4.5 billion RMB - can not be too far from the truth.