So... Will Nintendo be able to ship those 20 million Switch units?

[Chorlin]

RolStoppable said:
There's not much to go on in terms of sell-through so far. Japan is up year over year for the fiscal year period; strangely enough, the legs of the big 2017 games have notably decreased in recent weeks, but there has been no negative effect on hardware sales. The momentum is definitely healthy, but it has to be seen how the year over year comparison develops in the second fiscal quarter, because the current fiscal year has no Splatoon 2. Sales in the USA don't look as good, but they haven't been that great last year either. Reliable sales data for Europe is hardly ever made public, so nothing to draw conclusions from.

Regardless of how fiscal quarter 1 and 2 play out, it isn't that much of a stretch to do disproportionally better during the holiday quarter. Should Nintendo lag behind their expected pace, they can make up for it by offering better holiday deals than initially planned. That would have a negative impact on profits, but the topic here is the unit forecast for Switch hardware shipments. 20m can be broken down to 3.33m + 3.33m + 10m + 3.33m throughout the fiscal year, because the holiday quarter tends to be roughly as much as the other three quarters combined. If fiscal quarter 1 turned out to be 2.5m, that would be significantly behind the desired pace, but selling an extra 0.83m during the holiday quarter isn't that big of a task, especially with a one-two-punch of Pokémon and SSB.

No reason to overreact when sales in a month or two are on the disappointing side. Always remember that anytime momentum slows down for a console, there are obvious remedies: Price cut and big games. The only caveat is that a price cut is less effective if it's done without big games, but in Switch's case there are 2017 games still going strong and the holiday 2018 is set. We already know that Nintendo has the games, plus their financials make it clear that a price cut is perfectly feasible if deemed necessary.

Switch would have to fall flat for the entire April to September period for there to be serious concerns that Nintendo won't be able to ship 20m units this fiscal year.

:D