Why the Wii Won't sell 80m+

[HappySqurriel]

mrstickball said: Squirrel - I understand that Nintendo can easily get warehouses to hold Wiis in, as they do that with DSes. Here's my issue: The Wii is selling right now @ 1.0m units per month (give or take). Nintendo will increase their abilities to 1.1m or 1.2m in April and stay at that. Now, the question is, how are they going to increase SUPPLY in the holiday months? They won't buy/purchase/aquire more factories (atleast at a very large #), but they will do like you said: store Wii units. The issue with that is it lowers the 1.2m "average" which is exactly that, an average, and that's what I meant it as. I believe Nintendo might sell 1.0m units a month from now till October (on average), and stockpile the extra 200,000 units each month to then give them an extra 1.6m units for the holidays. Again, my number of 1.2m a month for the next 12 months is just an average based on maximum possible sellthrough + the fact that Nintendo will decrease their supply to retailers in the months preceeding November-December, as every company does.

I understand what you're saying but I think it is a flawed assumption that Nintendo will stop at producing 1.2 Million Wii systems per month ... Today, after 5 months on the market, people lined up for the opportunity to purchase a Wii at my local Toys-R-Us stores; the same story played out across most of North America and the Wii is difficult to get through most of the world. Nintendo is selling 1 Million units per month and is failing to meet demand in a time when they're not releasing that many games; if demand keeps up like this they will end up selling 1.5 to 2 Million systems on the months when big games are released. Nintendo are not fools, and know they will need to satisfy demand and have (at least) an additional 3 million units available for the holiday season this year; that works out to being that Nintendo needs an additional 500,000 units produced over demand to be ready for the holday rush. In other words, the smallest number of units I would imagine Nintendo boosting production to is 1.5 Million units per month; if that still doesn't match demand, or if their holiday supply does not grow at an adequate rate, I would expect Nintendo to increase production again in a couple of months.