You are forgetting the lag times introduced due to shipping and the actual production itself. I doubt that Nintendo would ramp up and down that fast but even if they did there would be a delay is before those changes were seen at the stores. It is also unlikely that once the component parts are ordered that the consoles based on those parts are not made. Each of the following steps takes time that you aren't accounting for.
- Order components and ship to Japan/China
- Assembly/production of consoles
- Shipping to retailers
On October 30, 2013
Nintendo maintained its 9 million Wii U sales forecast for the fiscal year through March 2014, despite only having sold 460,000 consoles since April. So with 5 months left Iwata stated that they would sell 8,540,000 million more units.
Here is the amount I calculate that the Wii U would have to sell per month in order to reach its 9 million goal and follow the 2012 hardware trend of sales.
(trend data taken from graph below) The percentage shown is that month's percent of total for the 5 month period from Nov 2012 to Mar 2013. I used that percentage as a weight to calculate the expected sales per month to meet the 9 million target.
Code:
Expected Wii U Sales per Month
Needed to Hit 9 Million Mar 31, 2014 target
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Nov 31% 2,606,103
Dec 41% 3,520,244
Jan 6% 545,276
Feb 12% 1,010,366
Mar 10% 858,009
When Iwata stated on Oct 30 that they would sell 9 million consoles by March 31, the November consoles were already on the store shelves, the December consoles were being shipped and the January consoles were being made. That makes 6.5 million consoles already committed to be on the shelves when the statement was made. The best case scenario would be that after the Nov sales, Nintendo decided to cut production. At that time the consoles that would appear on the store shelves in February already had their parts orders or were being assembled. These would still be made since Nintendo has already paid for them. That brings February into our total bringing the total committed to 7.5 million. The only thing Nintendo could have affected at that point would be the consoles that would show up in March. The prior month's consoles would either have had their components bought, were being made, in transit, or on store shelves.
That means that the best case scenario is that Nintendo had 7.5 million consoles made and only sold 2.41. That leaves 5 million left over which would take 2+ years to sell off at their current rate. Remember this assumes that they decided to totally cut production early December and that no new Wii Us are being made now even though Nintendo still has to pay for the fixed factory costs that they are obligated for until the production run was to be completed.
