Nintendo: Wii Shortage Is Missed Opportunity

Nintendo is currently knocking out 1.8 million Wiis a month, but it’s nowhere near enough to meet global demand. For example, Amazon UK sold 1,400 Wiis in 10 minutes last week.

So, all this demand - a good position to be in? A position manufactured (pardon the pun) by Nintendo to encourage rarity value and, therefore increase demand!

Hold on though, demand is already so high that you could argue that Ninty is actually losing money by not being able to supply it. After all, consumers are not going to stick around for ever waiting for a piece of consumer electronics. Especially not the kind of people who Nintendo has stated as its target audience - non-core gamers. As Nintendo of America's president Reggie Fils-Aime points out in a recent interview.^±



So, why not pump the profits from DS and Wii into upping production, opening a few more factories and coming closer to meeting the phenomenal demand for Wiis?

Fils-Aime dismissed these types of claim earlier this week, telling an interviewer, "At this point we are literally trying to catch up with demand….There is no secret plan to store Wiis in a warehouse to spur demand".

What's confusing us is why, in February for example, Nintendo didn't call up the famously cash-friendly Chinese or Indian governments and say, "Excuse us, we hadn't realised that both the Wii and the DS were going to be such vast successes. So can you give us some factory space to cover us over the holidays? You can? Brilliant!"

Cock-up or conspiracy? Either way it shows some confusing forward planning from Ninty.

With this in mind - and because the obvious question is often the best one - SPOnG has posed the following simple question to Nintendo today: What is stopping profits being ploughed into greater manufacturing capacity in order to meet demand?

We'll report back when we hear.

^{source:news.com via MCV}