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superchunk on 03 January 2008
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Sqrl said:
superchunk said:
I don't see stock pilling. Not, that I would think negative on Nintendo if they did.

THe only region where Wii was always sold out was NA. Europe had many reports as early as March that there was stock sitting in stores. Japan as early as July/August. So, the 'extra' is clearly units that were shifted from these areas to help NA.

That combined with a probably faster shipping process in Nov/Dec, which will lead to far less being sold in Jan, all contributed to what you see as an anomaly.

You do realise that consoles are region locked and it requires them to individually have be fixed in order to re-allocate them to a different region. This process cost time and money and its far easier to allow the stock that is already shipped to stay where it is and adjust your production ratios for the future.

With that said, the production numbers are global and no matter how much shuffling you do you cannot sell more than you have produced. Aside from that, stock only became readily available in a small number of EU countries and in Japan during the year. Now, when you consider that most EU countries only do about 10k on average per week those kinds of numbers simply do not add up to the amount of missing units we are talking about, even if you add in Japan. The major Wii stronghold in "Others" is the UK and it has continued to sell out before new shipments arrive all along. The UK also accounts for nearly 34% of Total Others sales for the Wii in 2007 all by itself.

But I also have to point out that if they were re-allocating units from Europe and Japan it wouldn't take months and months for them to arrive in the US. If they were being sent in March & July/August they should have arrived well before decemeber...which means they were still stockpiled anyways.

I don't want to dismiss anyone out of hand but I really don't find your scenario very plausible on its own. Now perhaps your theory could work as a supplementary re-allocation of units to assist in meeting demand but there would still need to be stockpiling in a major way to make these kinds of units available.

 I think you misunderstood me.

I didn't mean that they were taking stock already sitting in some PAL territory and changing it to come to NA. What I meant that as order for more stock slowed in PAL they didn't up the production for that territory. Instead when they increased to 1.8m/month they simply made more NTSC Wii's for NA. Same with Japan. As it began to slow they simply didn't allocate as many of the newly manufactured units for Japan.

However, after rereading your OP and thinking about the numbers. It makes sense. Nintendo had to have set some stock aside somewhere for the holiday numbers to make sense.