| RolStoppable said: Updated the spreadsheet with all the official data I could find. Hardware SKU breakdown is 5.30m for the hybrid and 1.55m for the Lite, so Nintendo's production plans have been adjusted to satisfy demand accordingly. The quarter ending June 2020 had 3.05m hybrids and 2.62m Lites, so close to a 1:1 ratio between the SKUs; now in the most recent quarter the hybrid leads by more than a 3:1 ratio. Nintendo's supplementary information suggests that fiscal Q2 already saw a chunk of the holiday stockpile being in transit. While fiscal Q1 had shipments of only 5.67m in comparison to Q2's 6.85m, Nintendo estimates that sell-through was higher during Q1 in addition to putting global LTD sell-through at merely "over 63m million" while LTD shipments are at 68.30m. Page 11 of this document: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2020/201105_4e.pdf Additionally, Nintendo increased their hardware forecast from 19m to only 24m which further supports the idea that a notable chunk of the holiday stockpile was already sold to retailers during the quarter ending September 2020. It's for the best not to expect a substantial year over year increase in shipments for the holiday quarter, so calculate with a range of 9-11m instead of a more ambitious 12-14m. Either way though, Nintendo is going to meet their updated forecast with ease; a flat 9m would bring the fiscal year total already to 21.52m, so just 2.5m shy of the projected 24.00m. There's still no official word on production capacities, so we can't say for sure how much higher than 24m it is for the year. While demand may be there to hit 30m, that won't matter if such a high number of units cannot be produced in time. Nintendo's software forecast remains extremely conservative despite an upgrade from 140m to 170m, so now a good 1m more than in the previous fiscal year. The current fiscal year has already hit the 100m mark, so only 70m left to go; last year's holiday quarter saw software shipments of ~65m, so this forecast will be a piece of cake to meet even if Switch hardware sells in really only 24m this fiscal year. |
A difference of over 5 million seems crazy considering the console is selling out instantly in Japan and still very hard to get at the base price in the US I believe? I suppose it's not impossible, but it seems weird for retailers to stockpile that early for Christmas when they could easily sell those Switches right now.
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