Flood of Wii to end Wii drought

NINTENDO PRESIDENT Satoru Iwata has promised to boost Wii production by next month after a period of severe shortages due to massive demand for Nintendo's new console.

"We must do our best to fix this abnormal lack of stock," Iwata said. "We have not been able to properly foresee demand. We will do our best to offer the machine for those who are waiting."

This comes shortly after rumours of Nintendo searching for further manufacturing partners to ramp up the manufacturing and supply of its sort-after consoles.

Further backing up these rumours and the promises from Iwata, a Nintendo spokesperson confirmed to GamesIndustry.biz that the company plans to increase Wii production as demand for the console continues to outstrip supply.

"For the first three months of this year we have been producing one million hardware units per month. We are increasing the manufacturing capacity and forecast to ship 14 million in this fiscal year to our distributors and retail customers globally," the spokesperson said.

These statements come shortly after Nintendo announced annual profits up 77.2% to ¥174.3bn ($1.4bn) for the year ending 31 March, with operating profit reaching ¥226.02bn ($1.9bn), which is an incredible 150% increase on last year's figures.

Overall sales surged 90 per cent to a record ¥966.5 billion ($8.1 billion).

The record profits are certainly attributable to the incredible demand for Nintendo's Wii and the continued sales of the DS.

Since its release in November 2006, Wii sales have topped 5.84m units globally along with almost 29m games, while DS sales exceeded 23m units along with game sales totaling 123m.

Nintendo also forecasted global sales of 14m Wii hardware units and 55m software unit sales in 2007's financial year, and projected sales of 22m DS systems and 130m games.

According to these predictions, the company forecast sales of ¥1.14tn, an 18% increase on 2006, and an operating profit growth of almost 20% to ¥270bn.

No wonder Mario can afford to fly off into space in his next adventure. Maybe he can pay for Stephen Hawking too. µ

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