I've read posts suggesting that Nintendo tends to slow down shipments of Wiis near the end of the fiscal year, when sales targets are met.

The question is, why wouldn't Nintendo want to out-do themselves? What effects has it to do with its share prices, etc.? Would you expect Nintendo to quickly shelve out many Wiis as soon as the new fiscal years begin?

The forecasts aren't "what we think we can do", they are "what we think we *will* do". It seems that Nintendo decided to ship this many units, and so they did.

There shouldn't be any big differences between the last quarter's forecast and what happens during that quarter, since it would be quite bad if a company couldn't predict what will happen in the following three months. I'm guessing that that's why Sony took so long to reduce their unattainable forecast from 11m to 9.5m PS3s; they waited until the point when it would look too bad to miss the forecast.

Now you could ask, why did they decide to only ship this many units? The answer would probably be that they need to stockpile for various events: holidays (not just Christmas), new launches (notably China and South Korea), big upcoming games (especially Wii Fit which should tap a new demographic). Since they already had a stellar fiscal year, they didn't need to ship many hardware units in the last quarter, thus they can keep stock for when it matters more.

Completely agree NJ5. And yes Nintendo should release more Wii's at the beginning of the fiscal year just to get a jump start to the new year. We will see in the near future if this happens.

I was thinking about that question just now... Will we see a big increase already in the coming weeks? It's definitely possible, I don't know what their expectations are for Mario Kart in Europe for example.

But I think it depends on what the level of production is right now. The units they stockpiled are probably already assigned to be released in specific periods. Outside those periods, the increase we'll see is probably equal to the increase in production (or even smaller if they need to stockpile much more).

I'm really looking forward to see what the new level of production will be... It should be a minimum of 2.3 million per month, but I'm hoping for more.

 How do you know that they didn't stockpile for release after the start of the new year. It would make sense if they already had met their forecasts for the fiscal year.

And Mario Kart is only a week or so away in Europe and Japan and 3 weeks away in the US/Australia. So it should get a nice jump and if Nintendo can release enough consoles should nullify the GTA IV factor. I think Nintendo is looking at that as a test for how the PS3 is going to do in the future. How good will it look if they could sell more Wii's than Sony can sell PS3's in the week GTA IV is put on sale. 

That's right, I forgot that some of the specific periods I mentioned are probably in the coming weeks anyway ;)

So I guess the conclusion is that we should see a nice increase in the coming weeks, especially in Europe and Japan.

EDIT: BTW, how is the supply vs demand situation there in Australia?