Nintendo pins financial hopes on selling 2 million Switch consoles at launch

Enlarge

Despite the company’s recent return to profitability, Nintendo is still struggling to recapture the kind of robust financial health it showed just a few years ago. An unexpected windfall from the success of Pokemon Go and the one-time sale of the Seattle Mariners notwithstanding, Nintendo is now expected to bring in roughly one-third of the money it did at the peak of Wii-mania in 2009. That’s thanks in part to absolutely dismal sales for the Wii U (the company plans to sell only 800,000 systems worldwide in the entire fiscal year), which led Nintendo to cut both its full-year revenue and operating income targets in an earnings release last night.

With the present looking pretty dismal financially, Nintendo is increasingly pinning its hopes of turning things around with its just-unveiled Switch console. That system is expected to ship 2 million units before the fiscal year ends in March, Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima said in remarks accompanying the earnings (as relayed by The Wall Street Journal‘s Takashi Mochizuki).

That 2 million system launch is smaller than the 3.06 million Wii U systems Nintendo shipped during its launch quarter in 2012. That comparison isn’t too useful, though, since the Switch number will represent less than a month of sales, compared to about a month and a half for the Wii U’s launch quarter. The Switch is also launching in March rather than the busy holiday season in which the Wii U launched.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments



Source: Ars Technica – Nintendo pins financial hopes on selling 2 million Switch consoles at launch