Well done Twroo.

BTW your avatar scares me

i believe it was November before they upped production to 1.8mil...try adjusting the chart for that and see what happens...

they were supposed to do it in Aug/Sept but got delayed...a november report where they said 'production is currently at 1.8mil' is the first time i saw it officially was 1.8mil

here, i adjusted it for the november 1.8 date...can u find evidence that it was def raised before november?

Hmm, well I remember the troubles they had being back in June... but I vaguely remember a second time of them having difficulty,... still a lot o people on here were saying it was August and I believe Nintendo themselves said they started at 1.8 million in the Summer, and summer ends on the twenty-somethingth of September.... so the latest it could average out at it 1.8 million starting (fully) in October.

Still, I have no evidence for that.

Your table seems to imply they were squeezing even more supply out of Decembers production.

I will change it if there is any more evidence against a summer increase... I was actually more sceptical about when it increased to 1.5 million.

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Edit, actually your plan seems to fit much better now.... Of Decembers production, 1.5 million was shipped in December, add that to September, October and Novembers production and you get 6.3 million... and a further 700k which was the holdover stock that Nintendo made in August but delayed shipping it till fiscal Q3.... that comes to a total of 7 million which is also what was sold in Q3.

I think I will change my original table to fit this now, it makes much more sense and fits perfectly that they will ship just short of 24 million by the end of March (their forcast being 23.84 I believe)

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Although it also seems to say Nintendo are absolutely totally sold out as of the end of March, so unless VGC has been overtracking it may not be correct.
That and if we ad the 300k made in December to the 1.8 mil in January, that comes to 2.1 million (compared to 2.9 million sold) so implies they were still air shipping February's production which will in turn eat out of March shipments.

So no I have now changed my mind twice, and the November inrease doesn't seem to fit (unless VGC is about 500k+ overtracked)

Although once more I am indecisive fastrabbit, because if I add the 300k made in December to the Jan+Feb numbers, that makes just short of 4 million, which would mean they had produced 24 million before March and shipped 24 million by the end of March. (and also means we will likely only see about 1 million sales for March [the extra 800k is the current retail stock])

But then that goes against what Nintendo usually does, which is keeping extra stock from the end of one quarter to ship in the next.

This is all very confusing, I think you may be correct fastrabbit, but I need more knowledge of what goes on inside Nintendo to figure it out (or else just a solid, irrefutable timetable of production)

Interesting table. It fits with the official numbers well enough, so I guess we can say reality isn't extremely far away from it.

Is the hypothesis that Nintendo are producing more than they need to meet their financial year prediction, but are holding back stock to seriously increase shipments early next year generally accepted?

Well even in my first table it's not a huge amount of stock being held back, a production of 24.6 million would mean they could hold back 600k and still be comfortably over their forcast....
However if fastrabbit is correct then I doubt they will be holding back much at all, as they will only just be able to ship over their target.

I think looking at the sales it is faily obvious they did something like that at the end of March last year, as an increase in production of only 200k wouldn't have jumped sales up that much, and also each three month period seems to be trending downward before the new quarter starts. (except the Christmas quarter)

If we assume they do hold some back like last year (they probably do it more for te end of fiscal year as everyone takes more notice of what they shipped and what they forcast) then we can probably assume March sales will be equal or lower than January or February, while April will see a huge boost due to the extra stock from meeting forcasts, as well as the boost it would see after December-Jan/Feb air shipping stops affecting the sales. 

but..but... at this rate, they won't hit JL's prediction of 500 million Wii sold until 2030.

There MUST be some problem with the data.

;), Nicely done TWRoO

yes, they can still hit any JL prediction, including 60mil by 12/31/08 if they increase production

however, i doubt they will increase it that much to make it to 60mil (i believe they could sell that many, but don't believe they will make that many)

I need to save this and point anyone too it who still doesn't understand the Wii supply dynamic.