It's still less than the PS2 level (and also a less expensive and less complex system to make I might add). My reference was to the fact that their are plenty of people who have said they have gone to a retail store and can't find a DS. While that is great for sales, it points to either the fact that they aren't logistically supplying stores correctly, or simply have maxed out their manufacturing. Either way, it's shoddy. Secondly, since sales of Wii have decreased off the high December Holiday numbers what is the explaination for not ramping up production? My point was a manufacturer of scale (Microsoft, or Sony in particular) can do that very quickly. Which they did do. Which is quite impressive that for a very advanced piece of equipment they got the supply moving very quickly. Even more quickly than Microsoft could. 1st off, no one just flips a switch and turns on another factory thus doubling capacity, and doubling your capacity simply by building another plant doesn't always work like that. Usually you would attempt to expand existing operations before undertaking such an expensive venture. Sony doubled their output in 2 months, Nintendo did it over a year. Regardless, the very fact that you can't find a system (almost 3 years old, DS) sometimes points to good sales, but also points to miscalculations in manufacturing and supply chain. So it's not wrong to say, they can't get their manufacturing together. And if you know Nintendo as a company it makes sense. They are not a manufacturer of scale and it's not surprising to see such issues with their manufacturing or their supply chain.

There are some MAJOR problems with this thread and I find it amazing that no one has pointed it out yet. First Nintendo no longer builds consoles period they outsource it but then so does Sony and Microsoft. At the moment all Wii's are being built by a company called Foxconn Precision Components. Thats where the supply problems come from. The talk is that production is going to be ramped up by having another company start to supply consoles as well. Thats how Microsoft handles the supply for the 360 at present 3 companies build the console (Celestica, Flextronics and Wistron). If Nintendo thought they could sell the consoles there are plenty of companies who could build the Wii and supply could easily hit 5 million a month if needed. But the more companies it brings on the more consoles it has to sell and Nintendo wants to take this slow to make sure it does not get into contracts where it has to take delivery of more consoles then it can use. At present it looks like its going to be either Asustek Computer, Compal Electronics, Inventec or Wistron who are going to start building Wii's. If anyone was wondering who builds the PS3 since I pointed out Sony does not its Asustek one of the companies trying to get the Wii contract. Yes this is the same Asus that makes computer hardware and a lot of the Macintosh laptops.

@Stromprophet: Thanks for misquoting me about the factory... This question is about Wii production, not about PS3 production at all, unless Sony starts burning down Nintendo factories to build their own on top of its ruins. If the DS is a feeble system as you said and the Wii is a feeble system as you said and the DS shipped 5 million units in its first winter as it did and the Wii shipped 6 million units in its first winter as it did there is no reason why the Wii won't be able to ship 40 million units in 2.5 years as the DS did in 2.5 years.

Thanks Kenban for naming the factories! Foxconn produces iPods too, by the way.

The model to follow today is Toyotas. End of Discussion period. Everyone and Anyone who works in manufacturing anything knows that. Implementation is equally as important. As far as 30 Billion dollar, I'd like to see where you come up with this. If we go by market capitilization (which is the traditional measurement of a company in terms of its worth). The share price multiplied by the outstanding shares you will find its market cap is 4.5 Billion dollars. As far as increasing manufacturing quickly, I'm still not sold on this if they are still having trouble keeping the DS in supply. I never, ever heard of the PS2 being out of supply after 6 months or so in the US and it still has a higher sales path than the DS does. Nintendo outsources a lot of their manufacturing and contracts a lot of it. Nintendo only has 2 businesses, the manufacture of its hardware and the development of its software. It has some other things in there like development of intellectual property, selling pokemon stuff, manufacturing game cards, etc. Uh....Sony had exactly 2 or 3 months of having trouble manufacturing blu-ray diodes and then it was fixed. What's the reason for DS shortage? Sales are great, but not any greater than PS2 which was more complicated and more expensive to make, and was certainly not having shortage issues 3 years into production. Part of the thing is they shouldn't have had much trouble making Wiis in the first place. Considering the technology is not that much better or different from the GC. I think a lot of people don't understand how small Nintendo is as a company and why these manufacturing difficulties arise. 30 Billion dollars? I'm still scratching my head on that. Even if they sold 100 million DS a year that would only be about 13 Billion dollars in Revenue. I work for a company that has 40-42 Billion Dollars in revenue a year and our market Cap is only 45 Billion or So. There's no way Nintendo is anywhere near the size of our company, we employ about 100,000 people around the world.

Did I ever say "Feeble" my god. Who is misquoting who? As far as what they can sell it's a different discussion. There are so many more factors to discuss. That's a wait and see I think. And I wasn't arguing or even talking about it so I don't know why you brought it up. I never said either system was "feeble" You questioned why I said they needed to get their manufacturing togther. Most big manufacturers outsource "some" of their components. I find it hard to believe Sony would not do the final manufacturing, I know they outsourced the blu-ray drives and other components, but I don't see a reason why they wouldn't be doing final assembly, especially for logistical reasons. Sony has manufacturing facilities for a lot of their things, TVs, MP3players, etc, etc. I do know this, it's a lot easier for a big manufacturer to "make" component suppliers lean their way over others. Working for one I've seen it happen. Which is more why I suspect Nintendo has ongoing issues with this and not just "wanting to take it slow" It comes down to $$$ and level of importance of the business. For instance if my company decided to pull from one supplier to another for say exhaust castings that would put a ton of pressure on the company responsible for the outsourcing of that component, but if some small manufacturer did the same thing they wouldn't care so much.

I think he meant Nintendo has 30 billion dollars to invest if necessary. The company has never had an unprofitable quarter since it has been publicly traded in the 1960s. That kind of wealth builds up greatly. It is true that Nintendo rarely (if ever) has revenues over 5 billion dollars, but they generally profit between 600 million and 1.2 billion dollars (thank god they do, their stock is paying for most of my college tuition). Nintendo must be worth more than that, because in 2000 Microsoft proposed an offer to buy Nintendo for 25 billion dollars. Back then, Yamauchi considered it a decent deal, but decided not to sell. Since then Nintendo is in significantly better shape. A company like Sony is so big that it has trouble predicting which sectors will be profitable and which sectors will have losses in a given year, while Nintendo streamlines revenues into ridiculous profit levels for a company of it's size (last estimate I saw was that it employed around 5000 people).

@Stromprophet Why do you keep coming up with Sony? Nintendo knows how to produce 2 million units of a non-bleeding edge system per month, because that's evidently how many DS they have been shipping per month recently. If you had any facts to counter that you could keep your posts shorter.

The fact is I've seen myself and heard other people say they can't find DS sometimes and when asking the retailer it's because of supply shortage. That means my statement "Nintendo needs to get manufacturing together" isn't wrong or nonsense. Which is what you were originally talking to me about if you remember. Especially when looking into 2.5 years of the product cycle.

Well, Nintendo does have a market cap of over 30 bln. You need to do a bit more research using outstanding shares * share price--the numbers you looked up are for ADR's, not actually shares. 1 ADR = 1/8 actual share listed in Japan, the number listed as outstanding shares. So 4.5 * 8 = 36 bln is the actual market cap. Revenue and market cap don't nearly have as strong a correlation as market cap and profit. Ford and GM have combine market cap of around $25 bln but with revenues around $350bln a year (coz they've been losing money). Toyota on the other hand has a market cap of $180 bln, on about $200 bln revenue. More comparison: IBM has twice the revenue as Microsoft but its market share is only half of Microsoft. IBM also, I believe, has 4 times as many employees as Microsoft. If I recall, Nintendo's 9 month earnings from Apr 06 to Dec 06 is around $790 mln in profits, with about $6 bln cash on its books.