Nintendo doesn’t really seem to be holding back supply; they just took a lot of steps to make sure as many consoles as possible where out there for the week before Christmas.
Take a look at the American sales from two weeks ago. They sold ~173K, then last week sold 740K. Obviously supplies from the week ending the 15th were held up to make a big splash on the week before Christmas.
In terms of the overall increase lately, Nintendo said that they increased production in the summer/fall. This most recent production increase didn’t really start effecting supplies actually on the shelf until November or so (this is a normal delay for manufacturing increases). They may have stored up a few units during this while still shipping at previous levels. This would really just be holiday planning though, and not something that would create the year-round shortage we’ve seen.
The final possibility remains to be seen, and that would be shipping methods. Consoles are generally shipped from the manufacturing plant by boat. This is slow and can take a couple of weeks to get consoles on the shelf after they’re manufactured. For the holiday crunch time, it’s not unusual for a company to switch to air delivery to get products out as fast as possible. If they did do this, they could have essentially sold half of January’s supply in December, allowing them to post huge numbers for the holidays. If we see really low Wii numbers and it’s still sold out in January, this is probably why.
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