Nintendo Quarterly Results (Switch 52.48m, Pokemon 16m)

[VideoGameAccountant]

RolStoppable said:

Metroid33slayer said:

Vgchartz already has switch at 1.5m sold in the first 4 weeks of January, just click on the year to date tab of the hardware bar chart. We know with famitsu sales it sold 560k in Japan this year alone. To me Nintendo forecasting 1.77m for Q4 is a joke and they are going low just to curb expectations to a ridiculous level. Last year they shipped 2.45m with just a port of new mario bros u and yoshi, if it doesn't sell 3m plus i will be shocked.

Enough of this "Nintendo is deliberately forecasting way under what they will achieve" line of thinking. This has to stop.

One factor to remember is that last year they shipped 2.45m while selling through more than 3m (VGC estimates 3.27m), so sell-through exceeds shipments at times.

Another factor that has yet to be mentioned in this thread is that Nintendo CEO Furukawa issued a statement that the coronavirus is impacting Switch production in China. That statement was ambiguous, so I hope that the Q&A session with investors can provide more clarity in the coming days. It's possible that there will be a temporary halt of production at one or multiple Chinese factories which would result in lower shipments and possibly shortages in the market space towards the end of the quarter. So excess stock from the holiday season might not be the sole reason for Nintendo's low forecast, because a problem in the supply chain cannot be solved within a single quarter.

There's no reason it can't be both. Nintendo has typically been conservative with their projections. The Switch was originally only projected to sell 10 million. Even this year's projection was too low. Nintendo sees the issues with oversupply and the coronavirus hurting the supply chain so they under project in the chase there was an issue and they couldn't meet their projection. The virus is going to make things uncertain for a while so they have no way of knowing the effect on the supply chain. This would still be a conservative thinking on it. Even if it's more likely they will beat the forecast, they leave themselves that room if they can't.