Nintendo reports a quarterly loss as Wii game sales tumble

July 29, 2010 | Dean Takahashi

Nintendo reported a loss for its first fiscal quarter, which ended June 30, as the Japanese company saw its Wii game sales wither.

Kyoto, Japan-based Nintendo said it had a loss of 25.2 billion yen, or $287 million, compared to a profit of 42.3 billikon yen a year earlier. Revenues were 188.6 billion yen, down 25.6 percent from 253.5 billion yen a year earlier.

The company saw sales of Wii console sales increase, but it said that Wii software as well as Nintendo DS hardware and software sales fell. In addition, the rise in value of the Japanese yen compared to a year ago had a big negative impact on net sales. Nintendo also had foreign exchange losses of 70.5 billion yen, caused by the strength of the yen. Nintendo has a lot of its assets in non-Japanese currencies.

Nintendo said it has sold 73.97 million Wii consoles worldwide, 573 million Wii games, 132 million Nintendo DS handheld game systems, and 740.9 million DS games. The company left its forecast for the fiscal year unchanged. It anticipates selling 18 million more Wii consoles by March 31, 2011, 165 million more Wii games, 30 million new DS hardware units, and 150 million more DS games.

Next Story: Roundup: Google, CIA invest in Web monitoring, RIM's touchscreen BlackBerry and more
Previous Story: Zynga confirms $150M SoftBank investment and Japan expansion

Twitter

Facebook

Google Buzz

Digg

StumbleUpon

Delicious

Google

More...

About the Author, Dean Takahashi

Dean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Follow him on Twitter at @deantak, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

http://www.pointingtrade.com/men-shoes-mbt-shoes-c-353_623.html mbt shoes

Thank you for your post
http://www.tailormypc.com James Spinosa

Makes sense, gaming companies often do not make a profit from the gaming console. Their business models are based on maximizing profits on licensing fees for the games.
http://www.tunetorials.com/ hyperlexic

But that's not what is going on here. They have been making oceans of cash until now. Google and Apple have made their handheld DS / DSi / DSiXL completely obsolete. Why would you even buy that thing? And since Nintendo has always skewed toward the more casual gamer experience, the threat from online casual gaming was nil a few years go – before everyone and their 'social graph' discovered Farmville and suddenly very mediocre flash games and the developer studios are the new kings on the block. I think Nintendo is surrendering their handheld console to Apple. That's why you see 'Disney' working a lot with Nintendo in the news lately. Disney almost seems like a proxy for Steve Jobs – buying up mobile app/game studios under the disney umbrella, but with Jobs being the major shareholder, that means owning them for his own mobile war with Google who are also aggressively buying the same type of companies. So what about the console? This is just my opinion, and I'm a fan of the Wii, but Nintendo had a massive two-year head start dominating the console market. And in that time they promised to show the world how their innovative Wii platform could be extended beyond hula hoops and bowling and endless 'Mario' iterations. Where are the multimedia apps, music creation and performance apps? The homebrew developers created so many cool proof of concepts that could have been incorporated into the Wii and turned it into something far beyond a gaming console – but it's MSFT now showing real innovation and pushing the limits of a console. If MSFT actually becomes a mobile player again with it's latest moble OS, they have a huge advantage over both apple and google – they have an xbox inside huge numbers of homes. The great trojan horse. Google and Apple have their respective mobile devices, their 'TV' offerings and terrific online services – but my latest BluRay player has the ability to do all the online stuff as well. For non gaming households, they buy a new dvd player and get the netflix/pandora/hulu/ whatever widget without having to pay “panasonic” a fee for online access.Nintendo is starting to look like Sega more and more.