Nintendo to boost DS production to over 2m / month

Japanese console giant Nintendo has announced that it's to increase its production capacity for the Nintendo DS handheld by 25 per cent over the summer in an attempt to meet increasing demand for the console.

At present, the firm turns out around 1.6 million hardware units a month - but with 2.5 million units sold in Japan alone this year, and the hugely successful DS Lite version set to launch in the USA and Europe shortly, this figure needs to grow.

Nintendo is targeting 2 million units per month output by the end of summer, according to a Bloomberg report this week - but if the DS Lite proves to be as successful elsewhere in the world as it has been in Japan, even that may not be enough.

Japanese consumers are currently snapping up around 600,000 units of the DS Lite every month, leaving just 1.4 million per month for every other territory in the world. Nintendo may soon be faced with having to increase capacity once again, to avoid a repeat of the massive shortages in the channel which were seen in many territories last Christmas and early in the New Year.