To those who don't understand my 60 million in 2008 prediction

[Avinash_Tyagi]

shams said:
There are two main factors at play here:

1/ How aggressive do Ninty want to be? Are they HAPPY to sell "just" 20m (12 * 1.8m approx) Wiis per year, for the next 3-5-10 years? They may well be - this gives them time to develop and sell software after all.

2/ "Hard" manufacturing limits: its difficult to explain to people (in a short period of time), but it gets to a point where its IMPOSSIBLE to manufacture Wiis faster. Not harder, not more expensive - but IMPOSSIBLE.

The core chips that come from IBM (CPU/GPU) have "hard" manufacturing limits. That is, the machines that make them - simply cannot make them any faster than they are currently being made.

For Ninty to *significantly* increase manufacturing levels would require a MASSIVE investment, and several years (if not longer) - i.e. potentially build their own factories. I doubt this is something they would ever do - rather just hunt down for more manufacturing partners, and slowly increase the output from all their factories.

I'm guessing they manage to upp their output a little next year (maybe up to around 2m/year, maybe a little more) - but not much more than this.

This results in around 23m-25m for the fiscal year ('08-'09), and assuming they are around 23m-25m sold by March '08 (their forecast) - results in around 50m total sold by March '09, or 45-47m sold by end of Xmas '08.

...

Ninty would have to pull a REAL rabbit out of the bag to increase production to around 3m/m, needed to get to the 60m level. And I don't see it happening - for now anyway.

 See this is only true if it is IBM/Ati that are the limiting factors, but I don't buy that, as we would have heard some rumblings on that matter by now, not to mention the fact that Nintendo has been looking for new manufacutring partners for some time now indicates that the bottleneck is with them.  I think instead it was one thing, people say that Nintendo could not have anticipated the Wii'ssuccess, I think they are only half right, Nintendo anticipated the Wii's success, just not how fast it would happen, with the DS there was a year where it had only lukewarm support and then the explosion around the time Nintendogs and AC and Kart came out, With Wii the adoption was at a fever pitch from day one, I think Nintendo thought it would have a year or so where it could get further production up and running before the demand took off, so they were caught off guard on that. But looking at Iwata's quotes, even a year before launch it was clear they knew it would be huge, only the timeframe was unexepected, we already know from reports that Nintendo has been looking for new manufacturing partners for some time, a process no doubt started a while back, it is clear to me that Nintendo will be upping production in the near future. They just haven't revelaed details yet, because, well, its Nintendo