Status: 04.11.2021 2:02 p.m.
The global shortage of chips is slowing down Nintendo: The manufacturer of the game console Switch cannot keep up with production. Hundreds of thousands of devices could be missing in the Christmas business.
Wishes for a Nintendo Switch game console for Christmas could go unfulfilled this year. The Japanese entertainment company is not assuming that it will be able to manufacture enough consoles for all potential buyers due to the persistent shortage of chips and electronic components. “We cannot produce enough to meet the demand that we expect for the coming Christmas season,” said Nintendo boss Shuntaro Furukawa.
The games specialist is now expecting 24 million units to be sold in the financial year that runs until the end of March – instead of the previous 25.5 million. There are currently no indications that the component bottlenecks are easing, said Furukawa. He did not rule out that his company could lower its sales forecast further if the situation worsened.
The competition is also affected
The Switch, introduced in 2017, was the best-selling game console last year – more than 20 million devices found a buyer. However, in the past six months, which ended in September, switch sales had already declined significantly. The number fell to 8.3 million consoles sold from 12.5 million a year earlier, at the height of the pandemic. Nevertheless, Nintendo is sticking to the sales forecast, which is to be achieved primarily through the new model of the Switch, which has been available since October. For the entire fiscal year, Nintendo expects sales of a good twelve billion euros.
The model has a slightly larger screen, more memory, better speakers and a new docking station. The display also works with so-called OLED technology, which enables higher-contrast images instead of conventional LCD panels. Experts, however, repeatedly criticize the limited variety of games that Nintendo offers.
Nintendo’s competitors in the game market, Sony with the Playstation and Microsoft with the Xbox, are currently struggling with the chip shortage. The new generations of consoles are sometimes difficult to come by, even months after they were launched.