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Ryng on 20 March 2021
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Shadow1980 said:
PDiddy said:

Common sense? I doubt there is around 5 to 6 million Switches in a warehouse or in transit somewhere, and its fair to say that it's a bit harder to track Latin America and SEA excluding Japan than the major regions. The other weird error is that Nintendo seems to not include MyNintendo shipments in their total sell-through numbers for Japan, which we can prove out with the known lack of inventory during 2020, especially in April. It's fair to say that at least 500k of those shipments aren't included in their cumulative sell-through figures.

Is it really that hard to believe? Shipped has never equaled sold. As of the end of 2020, the lifetime sell-through in Japan was sitting at about 17.65M, compared to 18.88M shipped. In the Americas, assuming again the U.S. is 90% of the regional market the LTD for the region is about 29M or so, compared to 31.17 shipped. So, between NA & Japan alone, we're already looking at well over 3 million units that have been shipped but not yet sold.

Looking at other systems, we see pretty much the same thing. For example, the PS4's LTD at the end of its fourth year was 73.6M units sold against 76.5M shipped, leaving 2.9M units unsold.

At this point in a system's life, several million units sitting out there in the wild is not unusual. Nintendo's "over 74 million" figure is not improbable.

Hold on now, USA is big but not THAT big. Just watch Canada sales (Can VS USA):

2017 = 400K VS 4.9 million
2018 = 540K VS 5.6 million
2019 = 630K VS 6.5 million
2020 (No data for December) = 790K VS 6.9 million

Historical Nintendo data usually have USA at around 85% of total America sales.

And yeah, 6 million difference between sold through and shipped for a console with stock issue is unbelievable too high. For some reasons Nintendo only annunce sales from the main markets like America/Europe/Japan, some times Australia.

Since you mentioned PS4, you can see how even when the console didn't have stock problems the difference was never THAT high, so it's hard to see how Switch difference in sold through and sold in can be this high when literally Nintendo sell whatever it can ship.