GameDaily has just published an interview with Nintendo President Satoru Iwata. They were lucky enough to get some one-on-one time with him at E3 last week and discussed several topics and touched briefly on the whole supply and demand issue. Here's what he had to say:

"In the spring of this year, we announced that starting from this summer (2008) we would have a monthly maximum production capacity for Wii of 2.4 million, and we are working with that schedule right now. We are [continuing] to increase the maximum production capability... However, the expansion of the market for potential customers, the number of people who are waiting to purchase Wii, is beyond our expectations right now. So for the time being, I really do not think that the imbalance for supply and demand can be solved immediately. For example, when we look back at the whole history of video games, in the past it was unthinkable that other than during the November – December time period we would have 700,000 monthly unit sales in U.S. alone."

Now I understand that he's referring here to the Wii console itself and not Wii Fit, but his comments do give us some insight into the way in which Nintendo handles it's production so here's my bit of speculation. For Wii Fit, they would have estimated launch sales based on past Wii sales to set a target (difficult considering that Wii Fit opened up an entirely new market) and then set their monthly production figures. Clearly they underestimated that figure and now need to ramp up production but that doesn't happen overnight. In the meantime they have to rotate distribution globally with the stock they do have which means that different regions are going to experience shortages at different times. That would explain why, for example, Wii Fit dropped off the UK sales charts for three weeks at the end of May / beginning June - just as launch sales would have ramped up following Wii Fit's release in the US. It all sounds logical but it's no consolation to those of you who still can't get your hands on one.