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colafitte on 23 April 2019
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StarDoor said:
colafitte said:
Switch is performing as expected. Nintendo is going to ship around 17'0M for the FY18, so Switch has to end around 35M shipped total by the end of March. If Switch has sold 33'0M to consumers by then there will be around 2'0M on shelves, in my opinion a little bit too much by this time of the year (althought perfectly possible). So this could mean three things: a) Switch is not going to reach the goal, b) Switch has sold to consumers more than VGC is showing, c) Switch is going to have that much units on shelves indeed and that will mean Switch is going to sell a lot more than last year in Q1 FY19 to consumers thanks to previous stock left available.

Wait, so you think that Switch shipments are going to be more than 900k below sell-through for this quarter? To reach 17.0M, Switch needs to ship 2.52M, and VGC shows sell-through of 3.46M for those 13 weeks.

Yes because there was a lot of stock back at Q3. So is perfectly normal that during Q4 there will be more Switch sold to consumers than units shipped to stores. In the end, by Q4 there has to be around 1'5-2'0M units on shelves. If you make the math, 33'0M units sold to consumers by the end of March plus 2'0M on shelves = 35'0M shipped units. 

StarDoor said:
Bofferbrauer2 said:

Winter is always where the shipments from the holiday season that couldn't be sold then anymore is going to be sold, hence why the stocks are shrinking in that period. But 900k is a whole lot and I don't think that's true, 600-800k seem more reasonable to me. Not very much lower, but still...

Yeah, it's definitely possible for sales to exceed shipments, as that's frequently happened with PS4 in the March quarter. It's just really bizarre for colafitte to say that the VGC data makes him think that Switch will miss the target. At the end of March 2018, Switch had 17.79M shipped and VGC says 15.87M sold, which makes a gap of 1.92M. At the end of March 2019, VGC says that Switch is at 32.93M sold. For Switch to end up missing the fiscal year forecast, its shipments need to be under 34.79M: This means the gap between sales and shipments can be 1.86M at most. The only way for Switch to miss the forecast is if it has fewer units in stock now than it did back at the end of March 2018, despite selling at a 26%+ faster rate worldwide in the first quarter of 2019. If 1.86M is too much to have in stock at the end of March, according to colafitte, why was 1.92M not too much last year?

Like i said, i did not said i expect Switch to miss the target, if fact i said Switch is performing exactly as expected to reach that goal. What I said is that to me 2'0M on shelves is a little too big number for me (and that's why i said there was a possibility Switch was selling even better than VGC showing), but that it's perfectly possible if Nintendo has some strategy behind that.

I will admit that because i was rounding numbers, in my mind i was saying "it's a little bit too much" because i was thinking 2'0M or more on shelves, but like you said, if they reach 17'0M that would be around 34'8M shipped, and just around 1'8-1'9M on shelves which is perfectly fine. So thanks to allow me to clarify that.

Last edited by colafitte - on 23 April 2019