Check out this report from Gaming-Age - here are a couple highlights:

In a new research report recently released, the Investment firm of Merrill Lynch has raised their rating on Nintendo from Accumulate to Buy.

....

Previously, they had expected a bearish 1 million units to be sold in Nintendo’s fiscal year ending March 2002, with half in the US and half in Japan. However, ML says that Nintendo has indicated to them that US distributors have already requested 4 million machines, which is equal to Nintendo’s shipment volume forecast. For the next fiscal year, shipments are expected to reach 10.3 million units, 2.5M in Japan, 5M in the US, and 2.8M in Europe). This strong outlook is due to robust demand in the US and Japan, the start of sales in Europe, and the expansion of volumes on the production of the Flipper chip to 1M a month from 600,000 a month. Cumulative shipments are expected to reach 34.8 million by the fiscal year ending March 2005, with about 25% for Japan and the rest overseas.

....

Merrill assumes that its shipping revenue per machine will be net ¥20,000 to Nintendo, which means that the net loss per GC machine should be ¥2,350. With the yen to US dollar at about 120 today, that means Nintendo will lose only about $20 per machine, much less then what Sony lost at the launch of the PS2, and far better than Merrill estimates that Microsoft will lose on the X-box. And to top it off, Merrill expects cost to drop to near break even in the second half of the fiscal year ending March 2002.

Once again, here for the whole thing.