| NJ5 said: It's not clear whether the 1.8 million per month production started in August or September, at least according to the articles I've read. The bloomberg article about it states fiscal Q2 (ending in September) as the timeframe for increased production:
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Maybe because Nintendo has repeatedly stated that there is no warehouse full of Wiis and they haven't been stockpiling.
The kind of stockpiling people were talking about was several million units. Even if they were just stockpiling from September to November, it would be about 700k/month which would be 2.1 million units. Those kinds of numbers that people were assuming in the past (other stated that they were stockpiling since July or earlier) would mean Nintendo would easily be selling a million per week, PLUS the extra units sitting on Japanese shelves because they hadn't been selling there.
If they sell 2.5 million in the first 30 days of December (~700k over production), there would still be no good evidence of stockpiling because Nintendo's factories could have been configured to put the Japanese firmware on that many units that didn't sell due to the months of slow Japanese Wii sales. Nintendo could have worked double-time to reflash the firmware in those units and sell them elsewhere, as well as halting the production of Japanese models and using existing stock to satisfy that region.
Frankly, we don't know what Nintendo's production rates have been, when they changed to what (except the 1.8 million number), how worldwide distribution has gone, etc. Nintendo stated many times that they were planning to increase production and many times that they'd had problems increasing production. The recent statements have been the best we've got so far.
"Normally we would come into the October-November-December time period with a warehouse pretty well stocked with hardware, but we never were able to achieve that this year because we were shipping and selling everything that we received from overseas."
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/newstex/IBD-0001-21528100.htm
There are other Nintendo execs saying the same thing. I think this is definitive evidence and hopefully the "Nintendo is stockpiling" and "Nintendo is creating demand by withholding Wiis" crowds.
Also from the article: " It takes Nintendo five months to increase production from the time it makes the decision to do so, Harrison says."
Consider that Nintendo can't adjust production for today's demand -- they have to adjust production for demand in five months. So right when the Wii was released it is understandable that they waited a bit: would you spend a lot of money increasing manufacturing capacity five months into the future based on two months of selling out a new product? You don't know what happens in those five months.
