The president of Nintendo, Tatsumi Kimishima, gave an interview to the Japanese magazine Diamond in which he returned to talk about a problem that, almost a year after the launch of Nintendo Switch, has not yet been completely resolved: the lack of stocks.
Kimishima confessed that no one in Nintendo expected such results. The initial projections amounted to about 10 million units of Nintendo Switch in a year, but at the same time, almost no one in the company believed it possible to achieve this figure. The Japanese house talked about the failure of Wii U, which in its whole life cycle of units sold just over 13.5 million.
Kimishima laughed at those days: Nintendo should have produced more Nintendo Switch consoles from the beginning, but it was impossible to think of such a success at the time. Since the launch of the console until the release of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, due to the high demand, stocks of many stores in Europe and Japan have ended several times.
Nintendo had to increase production and make agreements with other partners to buy the materials needed for construction. On December 31, 2017, the number of distributed Switch units already amounted to 14.86 million.
The situation has improved considerably, in most cases it is no longer a problem to find the console. Kimishima, however, has confessed that the problem has not yet been fully resolved, and that in some countries a shortage of stocks could still occur.
