Nintendo Patents Watch

(After copying the last post from my Bluesky account, I realized that I forgot to copy the following Bluesky post when it was published in May. So here it is.)

Mochizuki persists with his poppycock of Switch 2 “slowdown”. Let’s look at some hard data for what’s really occurring:

Image above shows the monthly revenues of Foxconn Technology Co. (FTC, 鴻準), a good proxy of Switch production volumes (because Nintendo is its biggest revenue source; img below).

Note: A 2nd assembler Hosiden was added in 2019, and a 3rd MinebeaMitsumi in 2020. So for a fairer comparison, you may want to mentally lower the 2017-2018 numbers a lot and 2019 numbers a little.

As you can see, the production volumes are cyclical in waves, except the sustained high outputs between 2024-11 and 2026-01 to stockpile Switch 2 units. Yes, the productions in 2026-02 and -03 decreased sharply, but that isn’t a sign of slowing sales.

Looking at FTC’s revenues by calendar quarters (img 1 below) and Nintendo’s finished goods inventories (img 2) side-by-side, it’s evident that Q1 productions invariably dropped after the holiday shopping season, in order to adjust the inventory level. The most obvious examples are the high inventories in late 2018, 2019, and 2023—leading to the lowest productions in the following Q1s.

The chart below is another visualization of this. Aside from Q1 2023 (TotK OLED Model launch) and 2025 (Switch 2 launch), Nintendo maintained a fairly consistent gap of production volumes between Q1 and the prior quarters—the Q1 2026 number is no exception. The “production cut” reported by Bloomberg is just the company rebalancing the inventory as it always has.

[Speculation] It seems to me that Mochizuki’s source(s) used the assembler data to concoct stories, possibly for market manipulation. Check out Nintendo’s share price movements before and after Bloomberg’s “25M units production” and “30% output cut” reports, respectively.

[Originally posted on 2026-05-06 Pacific Time]