Nintendo has reportedly doubled Switch production plans

Production targets for the Switch have reportedly been doubled thanks to strong demand for the machine.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Nintendo has doubled the number of Switch consoles it intends to manufacture in 2017 from 8m to 16m. This is due to higher than expected demand. Nintendo now reckons it can sell 10m units in its next financial year starting April.

Nintendo’s share price increased over 1.5 per cent on the news.

Were Nintendo to sell through all of this stock, that would mean Switch would in its first year surpass Wii U’s lifetime total sales of 13.5m units.

The machine apparently remains relatively hard to source in the US, while in the UK it seems as if stocks are certainly running low. Amazon is taking orders for a stock arrival at the end of the month, while the likes of Argos, GAME, ShopTo, SimplyGames and GameSeek do not currently have stock.

Analyst SuperData said earlier this week that it believes Nintendo has to date sold 1.5 Switch consoles worldwide.

The number was calculated by adding together the estimated 500k US sales, 360k Japanese sales and data from across Europe.Switch sold around 80k in the UK, for instance, and an estimated 110k in France.

Nintendo had previously said that it aimed to sell 2m Switch consoles by the end of the month – a number it looks to have a good chance of now hitting.

The big driver is the critical smash that is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which SuperData says was purchased by 89 per cent of Switch owners. That of course means nearly 1.35m sales for the game on Switch alone, to which sales on Wii U must be added.

Nintendo has yet to official reveal any sales figures for the console, stating merely that it has set a new Nintendo record for launch hardware salesin the USandacross Europeas a whole.