Wii Shortages Could Cost Nintendo $1 Billion This Holiday

[Josh]

[b]The Wii shortage situation represents a major lost opportunity for Nintendo. According to analysts, the company could be losing around $1 billion this holiday.[/b]

A new report in The New York Times quotes retailers and analysts who've suggested that Nintendo could be giving up as much as $1 billion in sales during this crucial holiday season thanks to the Wii shortage situation – and that's based on potential hardware sales, not including game sales for that hardware.

James Lin, a senior analyst at the MDB Capital Group, believes the lost opportunity is more like $1.3 billion in revenue. "It's staggering," he said. "They could easily sell double what they're selling."

Even with the shortages, the Wii was once again the best selling console in the U.S. this November with 981K sold. For its part, Nintendo doesn't feel like it made a mistake. George Harrison, senior vice president for marketing at Nintendo of America, explained that the company has to plan its production schedule five months ahead, and projecting future demand can be difficult. He also noted that there had been a worldwide shortage of disk drives that had affected Nintendo and other companies.

That said, Harrison acknowledged that Nintendo is a little concerned about losing sales to its competition. "We do worry about not satisfying consumers and that they will drift to a competitor's system," he said.

That's exactly what Sony CEO Howard Stringer would love to see. "I'm happy that the Wii seems to be running out of hardware," he commented at a conference in Tokyo.

Part of the problem for the Wii could be, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, that Japanese companies are typically too conservative. "Nintendo is afraid that if it makes too many Wii, the boom may crest too quickly," Masayuki Otani, an analyst at Maruwa Securities in Tokyo, told the NYT. "It doesn't want to satisfy all demand right away."

[[url=\"http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/news/wii-shortages-could-cost-nintendo-1-billion-this-holiday-ndash-analyst/18858/?biz=1\"]source[/url]]