Dear Reader:

You are viewing a story from GN 1.0 / 2.0. Time may not have been kind to formatting, integrity of links, images, information, etc.

Wii sells out in Canada ... or does it

by bethany
21 November 2006
GN 1.0 / 2.0

A bit from an interesting article posted by Globe and Mail. Thanks to TheKoopaBros for the tip!

Nintendo Canada doesn’t want to tell us how many Wii units are in the Canadian marketplace, and they can only tell us how many we can expect in the future in the most general terms, but they can say that they didn’t anticipate the demand during Sunday’s launch that saw a 100% sell out at the country’s biggest retailers.

“We’re struggling to try and find a solution to a situation in which demand has far outstripped supply,” says Nintendo Canada marketing director Pierre-Paul Trepanier. “The expectation was that within a few days (after launch) Nintendo would still be stock everywhere.”

What Nintendo can say is that beginning this Thursday and Friday (in most regions, but perhaps not the Maritimes and Eastern Quebec) the next shipment of Wii’s should begin hitting stores. Its project the retailers will get up to 50% of the launch-day shipment, which if launch-day patterns repeat, could see most major retail locations with 25-40 in stores.

What happens next week, and the week after is in more doubt: Trepanier says that every region in North America has been clamouring for more equipment, and in the Atlanta region company officials were hit with an urgent plea for more nunchuk controllers. Trepanier claims the Canadian market is doing well keeping its accessories in stock.

But Trepanier says that while there have been no production issues in churning out enough Wii consoles for the target of 4 million units produced and sold globally by the end of 2006 (with perhaps a little more than one million of that available in the American market) the consumer interest seems to have reached far wider and deeper beyond hard-core gamers than Nintendo could have dreamed.

Read the Full Article