Wii To Be In Short Supply This Holiday Season
An article in the NY Times has Reggie Fils-Aime, President of Nintendo of America and Tiny's object of not-so-secret-admiration, warning us that the Wii may be difficult to find this holiday season. Does it truly come as a surprise? With demand still remaining high and Nintendo unable to produce enough consoles to satisfy that demand, it's no wonder that when this Holiday Season rolls around, demand will increase further but there will likely be little to no increase in production of Nintendo's hugely popular Wii.
Actually, I'm beginning to think that Nintendo might want to solve their production 'issues,' if you will, before this coming Season. Some might start to think that maybe it really isn't demand that is high, but the production that is really too low. What do you think?
Nintendo Says Its Wii Game Will Remain in Short Supply [NY Times]
Super Timsy
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 12 July 2007
· Comments (8)
Other stuff like this: Holiday Season, Nintendo, Production Issues, Shortages, Wii
Havent they been producing over a million every month to ship WORLDWIDE?
Yeah, they're sold out world-wide. This is no production issue, this is just insanely high demand that hasn't gone down. Given that Wii is the second highest selling console each month, I wonder how many they are selling each month.
It seems like with a 6 month lead time, Nintendo could find a way to up production, but I'm certainly no expert on generating hardware. Nintendo seems unstoppable this year. Who knew?
I just can't seem to like the Wii. None of the games appeal to me. So I'm not really worried about the wii shortage U^^ Not that there is a Wii shortage in my country...
Despite what analysts are guessing right now, I gotta think that more production lines will come online in the next few months (you don't just make a phone call and add production lines, you convert a factory from manufacturing something else to manufacturing Wiis and it takes months.... what are they gonna do, cannibalize DS factories? Assuming they even can?)
This should mean that there'll be a few weeks you can find Wiis in September or October and when demand starts ramping up for xmas, ebay prices for Wiis will be more or less what they are now. If you haven't looked, Wiis are right around $300 at present.
I mean, they clearly know they can sell more than a million a month now, holidays be damned, and I'd think they would have come to that realization in about February. Unless some factory somewhere already came online and made totally broken Wiis and they shut it down, an increase in production should be happening within weeks.
I'm going to assume that analysts are assuming that if Nintendo could bring any more production lines online, they would have done so already. I'm also going to assume that Nintendo is doing so but, as usual, is behind schedule.
As others have said, Nintendo already has increased Wii production.
Cannibalizing DS factories makes no sense, as the DS is also doing very well. Nintendo may well bring another factory online to meet the sellout demand, but I doubt they'll be looking to increase the supply more than 20% or so... they just have no way of knowing where the demand levels off, and they have no interest in building factories to produce an additional 500,000/month only to sell an extra 100,000/month. I don't think Nintendo has any new hardware coming down the pipe, so Wii-for-now and retrofitting for something else later isn't really a viable option. Therefore, it would be financially stupid for them to increase production very much all at once. It would be nice as consumers to walk in and get a Wii whenever you want, but Nintendo has to look out for #1 and make sure they aren't spending $40 million on a factory to sell $5 million worth of extra Wiis.
I thought the demand has ebbed a litte. Both Amazon.co.uk and Game.co.uk have had Wiis in stock for a month now so I think the demand is less than what it used to be.
Also, like someone mentioned, some countries have had Wiis in stock for a while now.
Yeah, European Wiis do seem easier to come by in general.
In the US and Japan, ebay is still your best option (with a $40-50 markup, still a lot better than when I bought a Wii last xmas to give as a gift, and still better than the UK list price.)