Sony CEO Howard Stringer said that recent sales of the lower priced Sony PS3 have doubled after the US$100 price cut, according to the AP on Wednesday. Mr. Stringer reported that Sony sold more than 100,000 consoles in the week ending November 11th.

Prior to the price cut from $599 to $499, Sony was selling about 30,000 to 40,000 PS3s per week.

The move came at a time when Nintendo has been having problems delivering enough of its Wii game stations due to hardware supply problems. While Sony has only sold 5 million PS3s to date and Microsoft has sold more than 11 million Xboxes, every PS3 has a Blu-ray player while only a small fraction of Xboxes have had HD DVD players purchased as an add-on.

The price cut and recent surge in sales is seen by Sony as an offset to the extreme price cuts by Toshiba for its HD DVD players for the holidays. "It puts us vastly ahead of where the other format is going to be in terms of an installed base in people’s homes by the end of this holiday season," said Andrew House, Sony’s chief marketing officer.

iPO notes that this surge in sales of PS3s is also why Sony has not felt compelled to reduce the price of its stand-alone Blu-ray players for the holidays. If these numbers hold through the holidays, Sony’s strategy will likely pay off in terms of both Blu-ray market share and financial success.