The Road to 160m+ for Nintendo Switch (EDIT: See mod note in first post for new rule).

[PAOerfulone]

Based on Nintendo's own forecast, they anticipate Switch 1 being at 156.12 million units by the end of this fiscal year. It was at 1.89m units shipped as of Sept 30th for the fiscal year, so it has 2.11m left to reach that mark and meet their projections.

Based on the current data VGChartz has now, the Switch 1 has sold 811,700 units to consumers in Oct-Nov-Dec, and that's not counting America, Europe, and Rest of the World figures for December, so the actual total should be even higher than that.

But if we subtract that 0.81m total from the current LTD sold to consumers figure, that brings Switch 1 sold to consumer sales to 152.20m units. Divide THAT number by the shipped to retailers' figure - 154.01m, and that leaves us with a sell-through rate of 98.82475164%.

Now let's take the current VGChartz 'sold to consumers' figure - 153.01. If we divide that by the sell-through rate percentage above, that would put the lifetime shipment figure currently at 154.83 million units - Again, that's without December data for America, Europe, and the rest of the world.

Obviously, we won't know the exact figures of the other regions until we actually get them. But that doesn't we can't projected based on data we have now. And I have a good idea of how to do that!
Go to October, take Japanese sales, divide them by the worldwide sales, and that's your percentage rate of how much of Japan accounts for the worldwide sales.
Like this: Japan October sales (98.7k), divided by worldwide sales (280.4k) gives us a percentage rate of 0.3519971469.

Now do the same for November.
Japan sales (111.4k), divided by worldwide sales (377k) gives us 0.2954907162

Now comes the questionable but fun part! Take those two percentages, add them up, then divide by 2: That's the (my) projected December percentage rate for Japan. Which is 0.3237439316.

Now take the Japan December sales (184.3k), divide that by the projected December rate I just listed. That gives as a worldwide estimate of 569.3k units for the month of December.

Add that 569.3k figure the ones we already have for October (280.4k) and November (377k) and that should give us a sold to consumers estimate of 1.2267m units, or 1.23m units if you want to round up, for the Oct-Nov-Dec quarter.

But wait! We're not done! No take THAT number and divide it by the .9882475164 sell-through rate I mentioned before. And that should give us an estimate of 1.24m units shipped for the holiday quarter.

Add THAT to the current lifetime figures and Switch 1 should be at no less than 155.25 million lifetime units shipped as of December 31st.
Finally, subtract the 1.24m projected figure from the 2.11m left that Switch 1 needs to sell in order to meet Nintendo's projections, and it would need to ship 870k in this last quarter for them to meet that 4m figure.

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TL:DR - That's A LOT of figures I just presented, and there's a very good chance that the projections are WAY off. But in short, 155.25m should be the number to look out for when the Nintendo's next earnings release hits on Feb 3rd. If it meets or exceeds that, and, more importantly, if Nintendo maintains their projected figures or better yet, if they raise them, there's still hope.