Nintendo: Don’t Worry, Wii’ll Make More

Nintendo has acknowledged it's still hard for some customers to get their hands on their popular Wii gaming console - so the company is going to make more.

Just after announcing robust financial results for their fiscal year—buoyed largely by sales of its Nintendo DS and Wii gaming systems—Nintendo has acknowledged that shortage of its popular Wii console continue to frustrate some customers, and promised to ramp up production to increase deliveries to retailers.

“We must do our best to fix this abnormal lack of stock,” Nintendo president Satoru Iwata told reporters in Tokyo. “We have not been able to properly foresee demand.” Iwata declined to say how many Wii consoles Nintendo plans to produce in a month, but Nintendo plans to move 14 million Wii machines during its fiscal year ending in March 2008, which would necessitate production of over a million systems a month, on average.

Nintendo has sold 5.84 million Wii’s since the system’s introduction in November 2006. During roughly the same period, Sony has managed to sell 1.84 million PlayStation 3 consoles. Sales for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console have topped 10 million, but the machine has been on the market a year longer than either the Wii or the PlayStation 3.

Iwata also noted the company is making 2.5 million Nintendo DS systems a month, which is the highest disclosed production figure for any Nintendo gaming system.