Shipment wise we know 13.17 million were shipped by the end of September.... now add 3X 1.8 million and you get 18.57 million, but that doesn't include any extra stock that was still in retail in September (which would be minimal in USA but probably a decent number in Europe/Japan)

TWRoO said: Shipment wise we know 13.17 million were shipped by the end of September.... now add 3X 1.8 million and you get 18.57 million, but that doesn't include any extra stock that was still in retail in September (which would be minimal in USA but probably a decent number in Europe/Japan)

It does include any extra stock in retail, after all it's shipped numbers. Am I missing something here?

I believe that 1.8 million per month production might have started before the last quarter of the year, at least that's what that old infamous bloomberg article seems to imply.

I'm also interested in knowing the source of increased supply. It seems obvious that there was some stockpiling at least during September, whether it was done by Nintendo or retailers I honestly don't know, and it doesn't matter much for practical purposes.

 

Nintendo shipped under 4M Wiis in their 2nd fiscal quarter, which averages at around 1.3M units per month. Considering they were producing 1.8M Wiis in October I am pretty certain they haven't shipped everything they made in their second quarter. So every unit they stockpiled at September 30th should be added the the 5.4M units they say they'll be able to produce in the last 3 months of the year to get the shipment number for December 31th. And even if they announced no plans to increase production somewhere in October/early November doesn't mean they haven't done so afterwards. Personally I would be surprised if they don't end up shipping over 20M units at the end of the year, although they'll just miss selling 20M Wiis to consumers by that date.

Just_Ben said: Well NPD backed VGC up on the US part, the japan part is backed up by 2 other tracking firms, leaves only europe as "questinable".

Well said. Regarding Europe, it should be said that every report coming out from chart-track and/or Sony/MS/Nintendo seems to back vgchartz's figures, with very small differences.

For example, a few days ago someone posted a report about the Wii passing the 360 in Europe according to chart-track, which perfectly mirrors what vgchartz's figures are showing.

 

In addition to what everybody else said, speeding up delivery can also cause supply to be compressed in one month and very light the next.

NJ5 said: TWRoO said: Shipment wise we know 13.17 million were shipped by the end of September.... now add 3X 1.8 million and you get 18.57 million, but that doesn't include any extra stock that was still in retail in September (which would be minimal in USA but probably a decent number in Europe/Japan) It does include any extra stock in retail, after all it's shipped numbers. Am I missing something here? I believe that 1.8 million per month production might have started before the last quarter of the year, at least that's what that old infamous bloomberg article seems to imply. I'm also interested in knowing the source of increased supply. It seems obvious that there was some stockpiling at least during September, whether it was done by Nintendo or retailers I honestly don't know, and it doesn't matter much for practical purposes.

Oops, yeah i meant it wouldn't include the last few that were produced in September but not officially shipped [retail hands] by then.... I was getting mixed up with sales vs shipments. So although they had shipped 13.17 million by September 30th,... a further 2-3 weeks of consoles would be in the shipping process. You could argue that it should exclude the last few weeks of December, but I think Nintendo will have switched to the faster air-freight for the last few weeks. Which I imagine only takes a few days.

There's a 2 part answer to this:

1. Sold-to-retail (which Nintendo reports) will never equal sold-to-consumer (which vgchartz reports) 1:1. So if you want to compare the two you just cannot ask for 100 % parity.

2. For sold-to-consumer, look at October and early November. During that time less than 1.8 million consoles were sold, so now retailers can sell some more in the last few weeks. At the end of the quarter it will probably straighten out to a rate of around 1.8 million per month.

But please return to #1. You cannot compare sold-to-retail and sold-to-consumer 1:1.

Mmmh, ok...

Got some infos that are interesting and shed some doubt, it's just that I had heard from many different sources that Nintendo was shifting consoles from one market to another to keep demand under control.

In fact I thought that this summer Wii was selling lower in Japan than previuos months just because Nintendo shifted some console to the USA.
And shifting some more from country to country here in Europe as well.

In any case the number of sold consoles, even if shifted from one place to another, must come to a number that cannot be surpassed: the amount produced.
So if you all say that I made mistakes on summing up the number of console effectively produced that might be the answer to my question.

Let's see what will happen to the rest of the year.

^_^

I take the 1.8 million/month as an average figure, depending on whether they use four or five weeks in a month.

Also, as high as demand is, they still can't sell 1.8 million in non holiday months, Janauary at best would be like a 500k/500k/500k split by region.  November was like 1000k/100k/400k off the top of my head.  Its really only December when sales go so insane for everybody that Nintendo had to allocate extra units.  So if they've been making 1.8 million/month in Oct-March...

You ship...

1.3 million for Sept

1.3 million for Oct

1.5 million for Nov

1.8 million + the extra 500k from Sept and extra 500k from Oct and the extra 300k from November, to have 3.1 million units for December.  You send somewhere between 1.5 to 2.0 million to North America, 400k to 500k to Japan, and Europe/Others gets 600k to 1.2 million

Then for January, you try to satisfy leftover demand in Europe & Japan, with 1.8 million probably just enough to allow for a build up for the Smash/Wii Fit launches 

Also, in January there will be a lot of restocking by retailers. Not so much for 360 and PS3, if any at all.