Nintendo Switch shipment total as of  dec 2025 was 38.14, against a sales total in famitsu of 36.416m.

  A whopping gap of 1.7m,which would imply so many units on the shelves. Part of that is owing to Famitsu not tracking sales via my nintendo store sales and amazon jp.

Nintendo Switch was cheaper in Japan even before the weaker Yen, so it was all along enticing to import it from Japan and perhaps not just in asia, given it's not region locked , unlike 3DS e.g.

Recently, NS sold under 10k back to back!Someone mentioned shortages in the weekly sales thread and few members mocked that, plus others claimed that ns is on its last legs (i have to admit that this sounded an alarm even to me)! Nevertheless, how can a console face shortages with such a discrepancy between sales shipments?

Last week NS sales Jumped  by a lot, reaching 26k (restock) , oddly enough thanks to oled though, for several weeks lite  had been he top selling form (which is expected this far of ns lifetime), possibly it's having supply issues too.

Hence, the expectation would be the affordable and extremely cheaper than NS2 ,NS LITE, to be the one sku skyrocketing. NS lite cost just 150$ in Japan, 3DS level.

All these substantiating that at least a million of sales are exports!

Weekly sales baseline of NS remains a riddle!If Nintedo is restocking this late the expensive sku,it means NS still has some (tomodachi) life. 

True, but percentage wise of total sales, PS5 has been more impacted by exports in Japan. Which is why the official user base of PS5 bears almost no correlation with the software sales we see from PS5 in Japan. Nintendo has had games that have sold between 8-12M on Switch 1 in Japan, which shows that they had a gigantic install base there even though official numbers are somewhat inflated by exports, but PS5 software sales in Japan points to it being considerably lower than over 7M install base in Japan which are the official numbers.

We need a Japan shipment figure of ps5 to guess that.

I think famitsu doesn't indicate the export extent by much. 

Remember, going by the data ns should have 1m+ on the shelves, instead it was nearly out of stock.

Famitsu not tracking sales through Amazon jp, might be the answer. 

From where else someone or a shop abroad can import the console?

Your version about hw sw sales being incongruous is valid, albeit do we know the digital sales? Maybe Japanese ps gamers have gone fully digital (sadly). 

If I understand correctly you are saying the gap in shipped to sold is because of units being exported, but I do not believe that is how that works. I believe those exported units would still be sold through normal retail channels(and therefore registered as sales through Famitsu etc.)and then exported. The exporting does not remove from the normal sales channel, unless something really dodgy is going on somewhere.

Pretty much. It would have to be the retailers themselves purchasing the consoles, getting Nintendo to ship them to Japan, and then shipping them to another country themselves... When they could just get Nintendo to ship them to X country.

Doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Customers in other countries purchasing from Japan retailers would still show on Famitsu.