I was reading Financial Times today and again saw an article about the Nintendo's problems in Wii's supply chain. Apparently some of the Wii's suppliers can't scale up fast enough and this has become a bottleneck for keeping up with the demand in North America.

It seems that Nintendo has to rethink its supply structure for the future product introductions. I think one of the things that Nintendo can do in the long-term is to benchmark the supply chain planning system used in Apple.




I remember an article in New York Times in July titled "IPhone Futures Prove to Be a Bad Investment"; the article talked about the people who were standing in the iPhone line for a number of hours and were buying 2 or 3 iPhone with the hope of reselling it at a higher price. Well, these people were disappointed at the end because there was not a shortage of the product at the store level: iPhone was something like a Harry Potter Book not like Wii...

The fact is that the supply chain in Apple is really the silent weapon of the company to compete and it supports all the product innovations of the company from iPod to iMac to iPhone. Nintendo has to really look into what Apple is doing and learn.