Wii sales still healthy in the US, says Sebastian

On the eve of tomorrow's monthly NPD results, Lazard Capital Markets analyst Colin Sebastian is reporting that sales of Nintendo Wii hardware remained steady in March, despite data indicating a slowdown of sales in Japan.

Sebastian claims that "...our checks in the US still indicate fairly steady sell-through, albeit within the context of some seasonal sluggishness overall in hardware." Contributing to this, he says, is the availability of Wii consoles on store shelves, "attributable to production increases put in place last summer as well as a more normalised mid-cycle selling pattern."

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata admitted last week that the company was not satisfied with Wii sales in Japan, saying that "The Wii is in the most unhealthy condition since it hit the Japanese market," adding: "The current condition in the Japanese market is not the one we want."

Sebastian's other predictions for March are mostly in line with previous analyses, expecting that overall software sales will remain close to those from March of last year, and that overall hardware sales will improve.