It should be noted that this is "produce" not "ship/sell", the article estimates about 20m actually sold.

Yes good note! When Nintendo reports official figures, it’s always shipped. Whether they can pull it off? It’s certainly possible to sell 20mil and have 5mil in inventory. The system will have likely shipped around 18-22mil by end of CY.

I wonder if a 25 million order is to provide sufficient stock while there is a hardware change and tooling up for a new model sometime next year. I.e. maybe manufacturing will cease for a while as factories are re-tooled for a different sku. The Switch 2 is manufactured on a process that dates back to 2020 (Samsung 8Nm) and that process is mainly 10Nm not 8Nm. It's possible with the aborted launch of the Switch Pro that they already had a load of T239 chipsets manufactured but were never used at the time. We could be seeing a mixture of existing stock and new manufactured T239s for the existing Switch 2 but Nintendo is keen to switch to a better fabrication process down the line. This would have the advantage of less cooling hardware in the Switch 2, possibly a lower battery capacity and make the product better for the consumer and likely cheaper for Nintendo to manufacture (as long as they don't go for state of the art fabrication which they won't of course, probably 6 or 7Nm). It would also allow for a Switch 2 OLED with decent battery runtime and a Switch 2 Lite model. They may not come out at that point but a revised Switch 2 perhaps with a better display panel in the same way as the original Switch got an upgrade. Nintendo knows there has been heavy criticism of the poor display panel fitted to Switch 2 and many are disappointed by the poor battery runtime. It feels like a console that ideally could do with rapid improvement.

I agree that this sounds like speculation rather than an actual internal document, but it might be good speculation. We'll have a better picture when the quarterly results are in on November 4th.

But I think it's reasonable to estimate shipments for the Autumn quarter to be around 125% to 175% the Spring and Summer combined. So, if they do 8 million, expect 10 to 14 million more by December 31, which would leave them in the 3 to 7 million mark to get to 25 million... anywhere in that range not out of the realm of possibility.

Going by VGChartz, it seems to me 25 million is likely and 20 million is a certainty (minus any disaster like war or an economic collapse).

Yeah, 20m shipped is a pretty safe bet by March 31st. Fantastic numbers for a system's first 10 months on the market.