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Nintendo pull UK Wii advertising?

by Steven Williamson on 10 December 2007, 10:50

Tags: Nintendo Wii, Nintendo (TYO:7974), Wii

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Wii ads replaced with DS ones

According to Marketing Week, Nintendo has canceled their planned advertisements for Wii over the Christmas period as they don't want to fuel demand for the much sought after console. The advertisements will apparently be replaced by Nintendo DS ads. It seems a bit drastic doesn't it?

A Nintendo spokesman told the site: "We have been running the campaign all year round, but we want to take a responsible stance this Christmas and not fuel demand."

Despite increased production, Wii stock is flying off the shelves as fast as it arrives, with demand constantly out-stripping supply . A report in today's Metro claims that Wii has been exchanging hands for up to £1,000, while over on ebay they're consistently selling for more than their retail value.

Nintendo says it expects to sell 28 million Nintendo DS portable game consoles and 17.5 million Wii consoles this fiscal year, which ends in March 2008.

Source :: Marketing Week.


HEXUS Forums :: 14 Comments

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Posted by TheAnimus - Mon 10 Dec 2007 10:54
Wow.

This is intresting because i thought they made more dosh from a Wii than they do a DS. By quite a long way.

So how come they've not ramped up production of Wii? Normally this sort of mad supply and demand the advertisments still run, and then at the 11th hour some arrive miraculasly. I remeber thinking it odd that last year, it was quite a few months before we saw Wiis hitting the shelf again. I think nintendo shareholders should be asking how come its so hard to make a Wii.
Posted by Funkstar - Mon 10 Dec 2007 10:56
Are Nintendo getting free advertising and hype by starting rumours that they are pulling advertising?

Or am i as cynical as TheAnimus? :)

EDIT: oh and if they are pulling them, they are making the most of them until that happens, there has been one every ad break on The Discovery Channel this morning.
Posted by kalniel - Mon 10 Dec 2007 11:04
TheAnimus
So how come they've not ramped up production of Wii?
You mean by pushing the ‘double volume production’ button?

Fabs, assembly lines, raw material supply lines only have so much expansion factored in. If you design/build/test a facility that can potentially produce 10x your expected demand then you've massively over-engineered and you're on your way to financial ruin. They've built in something like 50% expansion and have already used all of it.

The only fault lies with them not realising that making a very small change from the unsucessful GameCube would push them into the stratosphere. And part of that fault also lies with their competitors.
Posted by TheAnimus - Mon 10 Dec 2007 11:17
Its been a year. The Wii uses simple off the shelf components, there is no component that is new, or difficult to obtain, Nintendo to my knowledge own no fabbing houses, as such they will of just got a big boy to do it (iirc IBM) now IBM will happily have enough slack capacity to churn them out.

I didn't fault them last year, but this year, i think they've not moved enough on the phenomial sucsess. If they where a truely great firm, they'd of figured a way of doing so, as NOTHING in the Wii is difficult or hard to make.
Posted by kalniel - Mon 10 Dec 2007 11:39
Of course, I'd forgotten they were fabless/non in-house :embarrassed:

However IBM won't be doing everything - I wouldn't be surprised if some smaller company/ies were responsible for some components - they wouldn't have the capacity to increase production vastly so Nintendo would be forced to use another company. Why they don't do that could be due to contractual or cost reasons, who knows? :p

I think we'd need to know more about what exactly the bottleneck was to judge further - it could be the remotes :p

Of course, whatever boost they figured out would have to be reversible - if everyone's saying the wii has very short appeal then the second hand market should eventually eat into new console sales.

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