Wii're all sold out.
Legions of shoppers are getting the message nearly everywhere they look for Nintendo Co.'s video game console.
Even though it ramped up production capacity twice this year, Nintendo isn't meeting demand for the Wii, which has been on the market for more than a year and is, somehow, this season's hottest hard-to-find gift.
Nintendo executives said the Japanese company had thought its production schedule -- about 1.8 million consoles a month -- would be sufficient.
Because components have to be ordered five months in advance, they said, Nintendo can't crank up output at its factories in China to meet the holiday shopper onslaught.
So lines of Wii wannabes snake for blocks around stores. By 5 a.m., hundreds of hopefuls are outside Nintendo's flagship outlet at Rockefeller Center in New York. In Southern California, some stores hand out tickets to Wii-seekers who queue up, letting them know how many are available. Some people accuse Nintendo of playing hard to get.
"I suspect that Nintendo is doing this intentionally," said Dennis Leon, a veterinarian from Long Island, N.Y., who purchased a Wii when a Toys "R" Us clerk tipped him off to a new shipment. "I wonder if they're doing this so that it gets this aura of the gaming system that's not easy to get."
That's not the case, said George Harrison, the company's head of marketing in North America.
Nintendo increased capacity in the spring and again in the summer, he said. In January, Nintendo shipped 1 million consoles a month, and now it ships about 1.8 million a month, divided roughly equally among North America, Europe and Asia.
"We thought we were being aggressive," Harrison said. "But, clearly, demand continues to outstrip supply."
About half of the video game industry's annual sales occur during the last three months of the year. Harrison said Nintendo wanted to ride the boom-and-bust nature of the business by finding a steady output rate that could satisfy customers without adding too much capacity, which can pump up cost when demand slackens and equipment goes idle.
"Normally we'd build up inventory over the summer when demand is slower," he said. "Instead, we ended up selling everything we could make this summer. As a result, we went into the holidays without any additional inventory."
The shortage is "unprecedented" for a console over a year old, said Billy Pidgeon, an analyst with IDC. "With the Wii, there was never a lull in demand."
