Earlier today Nintendo released their year-end financial statement, which revealed the company has made its first annual operating profit in four years. This economic up-turn, is, in part due to “depreciation of the yen against the U.S. dollar at the end of the period”, say the company.
Operating profit for the year to March 2015 was ¥24.8bn, (~$207m, £136m) – improving upon Nintendo’s ¥20bn forecast and analyst predictions. Despite slowing revenue growth, the firm remains hopeful for the future too – anticipating its annual operating profit will more than double in the next year to some ¥50bn.
Elsewhere, sales for the fiscal year fell 3.8% to ¥549.8bn, which, whilst disappointing, is an upward trend year-on-year. Nintendo forecast sales for the year ending March 2016 will be up 3.7% to ¥570bn, but the company’s net income will fall to ¥35bn (a drop of 16.4%). A reduction in sales of hardware units is the expected reasoning for this decline.
Now, that’s all very interesting, I hear you cry, but I want cold hard facts! Just How many Wii U’s have they sold?
The 3DS (unsurprisingly) remains Nintendo’s strongest selling hardware family, with annual sales amounting to 8.73million units, less than the over 12m sold through in 2013-’14, but still a healthy number, and bringing the machine’s lifetime sales to a whopping 52m.
Wii U sales over the same period total 3.38m, (up from 2.72m), bringing the home console’s life-to-date figure in at 9.54million units.
On the software side of things, Nintendo revealed the latest 3DS Pokémon titles – Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire “enjoyed robust sales” of 9.94 million units combined, with Mario Kart 7, The Legend Of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D, and Tomodachi Life also showing “steady sales” of more than 2 million a piece. Global sales of Nintendo 3DS software reached 62.74 million units, ~500,000 down on last year.
With respect to the Wii U, Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. have been declared “hit titles”, selling 5.11 million units and 3.65 million units respectively. It’s worth pointing out here that Smash Bros on 3DS has sold nearly twice that of it’s big brother, at 6.75m, and that sales of Wii U software in 2014-15 were 24.40m total, meaning more than one-in-five Wii U owners may well currently be racing around Baby Park at 200cc. What a joyous thought!
The report also includes mention of Nintendo’s potential revenue streams moving forward – more DLC, such as that rolled out for Mario Kart and Smash Bros., which leads to titles being “played more actively”, which is posh-speak for “not collecting dust on your shelf a week after release”. There’s also a nod to the recently revealed amiibo cards, and talk of more Woolly World inspired yarn-knitted figurines being added to the existing line-up in the coming months.
Finally, Nintendo talk about their partnership with DeNA, and how the planned “joint development and operation of gaming applications for smart devices using Nintendo’s intellectual property, including its characters” will be a new source of revenue for the Japanese giant later this year.
Source: Nintendo Financial Report
Kennykazey
That Amiibo money!
Matthijs
Maybe now they can invest some money in getting that horrible ui improved. It’s slower than my old PS3. Going from ps4 to wiiu always feel like going back to 2004.
That said however, mariokart still rocks and that’s all I got it for.