Takashi Mochizuki filed another hit piece on Nintendo. Per usual, his story falls apart upon even just cursory examination:
- He claimed that Nintendo originally planned to produce 6M units of Switch 2 in Jan-Mar. Since 17.37M were already sold by Dec, Mochizuki is suggesting that the company plans to sell 23.37M units1 in just 9 months!
- However, even at the COVID induced height, Nintendo sold 28.83M (FY2021-03) and 23.06M (FY2022-03) units of Switch 1 in 12 months. Why would the management even consider making 23M+ units in 9 months for a brand new console with few exclusives?
- Mochizuki argues that Nintendo typically gives a conservative hardware forecast and revises it upward after Q3; because Nintendo didn’t revise upward after this Q3, there must be a “slowdown”.
- But this argument simply isn’t true. Post Switch intro in 2017, Nintendo revised hardware forecast up 4 times and down 4 times after Q3. The pattern that he presented as a fact does NOT exist.
This is really embarrassing.
- Although the article referred to the production volume not sales projection, a production order is based on a company’s forward sales projection and desired inventory level. By 2025-09 (no newer data available), Nintendo’s “finished goods” inventory was already at a historic high (¥492B+), therefore I doubt that they’d want to raise it even more in Q4 (especially if the sales slowed, as Bloomberg said). Assuming they plan to maintain the inventory level, the Q4 production volume is essentially the sales projection of Q4. ↩︎
[Originally posted on 2026-03-23 Pacific Time]
