Speaking at the Japanese premiere of the Sony Pictures-produced Spider-Man 3, the Financial Times reports that Howard Stringer repeated the comments by other Sony executives that the record breaking sales of the PS3 was "the largest consumer electronics sale in history".

He added: "We came into the [European] market with more games and perhaps we lived up to the expectations in Europe in a way that perhaps we didn't in Japan," he said.

Stringer also said that the console was close to selling through 800,000 units in Europe, a number he expects to keep rising as more games appear for the machine: "I see no reason we can't use content to drive the sales of hardware as the network connectivity becomes more sophisticated."

His comments come just as analysts have pointed out that Sony is set to start making money of its console, R&D and production of which has until now dented its finances.

At the same time, Stringer said his attempts to put Sony in better shape by encouraging more communication between its many divisions were aiding a turnaround - although he was first to say that any recovery was still incomplete.

He said: "We are building the various relationships between the companies so our devices can talk to each other. We've begun that process. But I don't think we can really say the turnround is complete until we've seen evidence of that.

"The nightmare for me is complacency."