| cookingyourmama said: Because their data was so good to begin with that it doesn't need changing, how about that for a possible reason. Plus like i've said before how do you know what changes have taken place at all? Do you think a multi million company with decades of tracking knowledge would come up with significantly wrong data in first place that when it gets changed it significantly changes the original ltd's?
|
I will explain it to you a different way ...
Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony all announce 100% accurate numbers which reflect the shipments of their hardware at a particular point in time; they're legally obligated to provide the most accurate numbers possible so they're very trustworthy. When you're trying to track sales to consumers what you're really trying to track is:
(Sales to Consumers) = (Shipped) - (Unsold inventory) - (unsold systems)
The unsold inventory can include the number of systems that are in retailer inventory, in transit, or possibly in the manufacturers warehouse depending on how the manufacturer handles their accounting. The size the unsold inventory is not a constant value, but it is a number which operates in a particular range depending on multiple factors; basically, a retailer is only going to accept so many consoles and a manufacturer is not going to stockpile years worth of inventory for no reason. The unsold systems include replacement systems and systems that were given away (or possibly sold through untracked channels).
Unless you track 100% of the data at the retailer's end (which no one does), or unless your analysts are surprisingly lucky (in which case they should pick lottery numbers), you will have fairly large errors in your data that need to be adjusted. If you blindly continue on without consideration of what the shipped numbers actually mean in reference to the sold to consumer without adjusting your total and methodology you will (eventually) end up with either a number of systems sold that surpass the shipment numbers, or an unsold inventory that is entirely unrealistic.
Right now your NPD numbers demonstrate (roughly) a 10% error for Wii numbers as of March 31st 2008 ... if they continue with a similar error rate eventually the number of systems they expect retailers to have in inventory will surpass the number of Wii systems sold in a year, or they will have the Wii's replacement rate at an unrealisticly high number (given that the majority of replacement systems are refurbished).
