An end to the WII shortage?

After a year and a half of the Nintendo Wii being released inside the United States, it may finally become possible for anybody to get their hands on one. Nobody knows for sure why the Nintendo Wii was so hard to find here in the states, but one reporter, Victor Godinez of the Dallas Morning News, thinks the fault lies in the weakness of the declining value of the U.S. dollar.

The theory, according to Godinez, is that because the U.S. Dollar has been weakening, it has become less profitable for Nintendo, who is a Japanese Company, to sell them here. Just 4 months ago a $300 Wii was worth about 35,000 yen, but today it is now only worth 29,000 yen, a decrease of 20%.

Why then would the shortage stop if the value of the U.S. Dollar is still low? Well the answer is because, since the exchange rates in Europe have been strong, Nintendo has been focusing on distributing all of its Wiis over there, and because they are so easy to find outside the U.S., demand has been falling. Thanks to that demand outside the U.S. falling, it is predicted that Nintendo will now resort to sending a lot more systems to the U.S. where demand is still very high.