Nintendo halves losses even with DS and Wii sales falling
Nintendo has released its earning report for the first financial half of 2012. It’s cliche, but there’s both good news and bad news in this report. The bad news first, Nintendo is still losing money, it lost 29.2 billion yen between April and September. This though is an improvement over the 57.3 billion yen they lost in the same time last year. Satoru Iwata’s keeping his promise of getting Nintendo back in the black, slowly.
So how about sales? The Nintendo 3DS is continuing to do well with sales up 64.8 percent with now 5.06 million sold in the period of which 2.1 million of them are 3DS XL units. Nintendo says that they had hoped the 3DS would have done better outside of Japan as well, it seems Nintendo just can’t stop selling Nintendo DS console. Especially in America. The Wii and DS though are of course not doing as well as they used to, they are at the end of their lifespan. The Wii especially though is selling a trickle at this stage.
Nintendo hopes to sell 5.5 million Wii U consoles in the second half of it’s financial year which. This probably won’t bring Nintendo back to profitability just yet but it is helping.
Expected at this point in the game to be making loses simply due to a slow market but that’s normal. At least Iwata and his crew are doing a good Job of controlling the flow somewhat.
In other news if sales stay at the current slow pace Wii will at least surpass the 100 million mark by early next year which is a real achievement no matter how you slice it.