While Sony Computer Entertainment pontificate about what could happen with the loss making Playstation and PSP gaming machines, Nintendo has delivered a massive operating profit of $A3.7 Billion dollar and a 9.9% lift in sales. Sony is expected to make a loss of over $4 Billion when they announce their results next week with Playstation adding more problems than opportunities for Sony.
Overseas sales accounted for 87.5 percent of the take. In Australia Nintendo have over 70% of the portable gaming market with their DS and DSi handheld units and over 65% of the console market with their highly popular Nintendo Wii.
To date Nintendo has weathered the economic storm significantly better than Sony who in the first quarter have seen sales decline both globally and domestically or both their Playstation consoles and handheld PSP.
Sony and Microsoft, which produces the Xbox 360 console, have both announced job cuts.
In their annual report, Nintendo was upbeat about its future and the games industry as a whole. In a statement it said: “[While] the future of economies around the world is still unclear, the video game industry was less impacted by the economic downturn than most [and] remained relatively stable in spite of the large consumer spending decline.”
Nintendo’s profits have grown steadily over the past three years and the firm said it expected its net income to rise over the coming year, to 300 billion yen.
Last year, the firm sold 25,950,000 Wii consoles and 31,180,000 DS machines although it expects sales for the next 12 months to remain steady or decline slightly.
The firm also said it was working on a number of software titles, including The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks and Wii Sports Resort.
For the current fiscal year, beginning April 1, Nintendo projected sales of another 26 million Wii hardware systems and 220 million software units, while Nintendo DS sales are projected at 30 million hardware systems and 180 million pieces of software.
Nintendo forecasted its net profit to rise 7.5 percent rise $US3.04 billion (300 billion yen) for the fiscal year through March 2010. But sales are expected to decline 2.1 percent to $US18.2 billion (1.8 trillion yen), and operating profit to drop 11.8 percent to $4.97 billion (490 billion yen).
