| fleischr said:
Is it really though? The MK8 boost anyway you look at it is pretty incredible and took many retailers by surprise I'd imagine. Though that doesn't change the fact many retailers stayed pretty cagey on stocking more Wii U & Nintendo undershipping a product isn't a uniquely new. This entire year, I very seldom see a retailer stock any more than 3 Wii U at a time. So to me, a small number on shelves end of June, in the midst of a MK8 frenzy, makes sense. Based on Nintendo's current high inventory levels and overall bad sales of Wii U, retailers have some leverage against Ninty. And even for as good MK8 has been, at the end of the day retailers know the Wii U product line to be pretty slow moving and don't want to massively outpace stock to demand just based on stronger than usual sales for a 2-4 week time frame. |
This argument doesn't really hold up when you look at the actual numbers. Q1 was the biggest shipment of Wii Us outside of the holiday quarters. That shipment was also heavily tilted toward the Americas and Europe/other. VGC shows Japan having 75% of the units on shelves, yet Japan accounted for less than 12% of that quarters shipments (compared to 28% of shipments LTD). Japanese shipments were actually down YoY. Americas shipments more than quadrupled, and Others were up 17x (it was only 10k last year).
So Japanese retailers seem to be the ones more cagey about taking on Wii Us, yet they have 60k on shelves. The West on the other hand took on more units than any time outside of the holidays, and they only have 19k on shelves. Yet despite having the channel so dry, within 5 days they were able to get enough Wii Us out there to sell 58k in the West. They were able to do this so quickly and so evenly that European sales were virtually unchanged that week, and US sales actually went up. There also must be basically zero older bundles left on shelves considering they would have had near complete sell through of every Wii U ever shipped in the west at the end of June.
