I don't believe Nintendo would ship only 20,000 a week to Japan just to stockpile.  They were obviously stockpiling during those months, but 20k a week is just piddly, and they didn't decrease shipments to other areas during that time.

Did they release how much they shipped yet?

^ no... I think we will have to wait till the fiscals, 21st?...and for Sony the 29th of Jan [though Sony havr given part of their shipment we don't know the bit between October 1st and black friday.

 i never meant to imply that nintendo should start stockpiling for next holiday already.  All I meant to say was that if demand slows down a bit (aka not 450k a week sellout) it's not really a big deal because they will want to stockpile some for the holidays.

nintendo said it's going to maintain production levels as is until the end of the fiscal year at which point they will decided if an increase in production is necessary.   nintendo is a conservative company and they'd rather error on the side of short supply than to increase production too quickly.  if they are still sold out as fast as they can produce them expect a production increase so that they can take full advantage of next years holiday.

I thought they only gave the shipment number for USA?

By the way, it's 24th for Nintendo and MS and 31st for Sony (on their respective timezones of course).

October-Nov is the slowest time of the year in Japan, Nintendo knows that. They probably shipped next to nothing in that period. Think about it... where else did nintendo get 1.5 million Wii's for the week before christmas WW. They were skimming of the Wii supply WW from August to October, and they almost strangled Japan's supply during a 6- week period. It is not like all those sales went somewhere else..... I mean PS3 had what 3 weeks of about 60k.. Yes, and that was due to the ultimate combo.

(sigh) All this silly talk about stockpiling.

Please keep in mind that a slow boat from China takes about 4-5 weeks to get to the U.S. So larger shipments were probably diverted in October and part of November to arrive in time for the U.S. holiday rush. (It also didn't hurt that Japan appeared to have enough consoles at that time.) As the holidays grow closer, Nintendo starts paying more to air freight the consoles into the country which takes about 7 days time. Using both methods of shipments, you can easily get a massive amount of inventory at once. But if you take all of the units that you would have shipped via ocean and instead shipped them via air, it means that you'll run into shortages until the ocean shipments start arriving again. (This is why the DS has run into problems each year after the holidays.) I wouldn't be surprised to see a similar situation for the Wii at the beginning of this year.

As MS has shown, there appears to be about a 1M unit stockpile that retailers are willing to hold onto at any one time. So Nintendo doesn't need to worry about demand until they can fill retailer stores and warehouses. So even if the Wii only sold 300K per week, it would still take Nintendo months to produce enough units to satisfy retailer demand. And once that was satisfied, I'm sure Nintendo wouldn't mind building up their own warehouses with units for the fluctuations in demand.

What I foresee happening, however, is that Nintendo will once again meet demand in Europe fairly early in the year (many have commented that the Wii wasn't very supply constrained in Europe and other territories in 2007). Japan will take a little longer since demand has actually picked back up with Wii Fit and will see another spike with SSBB at the end of this month. The U.S. will continue to be the wild card. I didn't think there would be shortages throughout 2007. And I'd like to believe that Nintendo will finally be able to make enough to satisfy demand in 2008 for at least a few short months over the summer. But with consoles still hard to come by and some big games coming down the pike, I think we could see a repeat this year as well.

agreed with most of what you said Steve, I predicted that the Wii would run dry for 2-3 weeks in January a few weeks back(70-100k in US and Others). The only thing I disagree on is the Demand in Others. I believe that the Wii is "catching" on there as we speak, holidays 07 prove this. Just like the US was the last region for the DS to catch fire in, others was the last region for the Wii, Cept it took the Wii 1 year and the DS 2. I think demand will be MUCH HIGHER in US than it was last year, same in Japan, and similar NA 07 demand in Europe. The Wii still has regions(Spain, Italy... etc) to conquer in Others also(I believe the Wii conquered Germany recently) , once they are, expect the demand to rise further,

At Amazon France, the Wii was listed as sold out for at least a few weeks, now it's listed as "in stock on the 23rd of January".

In Amazon Germany it was also sold out, and it's now listed as "shipped in 1-3 weeks".

In Amazon UK it's listed as sold out, as it has always been (even many months before Christmas).

I'd say that Nintendo is now trying to restock the retail channel (as someone else said in the previous page), what is not known yet is whether demand will be bigger than last year. In 2007, it was easy to get a Wii in Europe except in UK, where it was really hard to find one. This year, it might sell out in more countries, with all the word of mouth going around. Either way, I'm pretty sure it will be selling fine everywhere in Europe.