Nintendo’s Q3 report ends with losses, misses sales targets

Nintendo has handed down its quarterly earnings report and has fallen short of even its revised hardware and software figures. The reporting period is the nine month period up until December 31st of 2013.

Worldwide Wii U sales reached only 2.41 million where it had been predicted (after being revised down) to reach 2.9 million. Wii U game sales were down naturally as well down to 15.96 million, the company had expected to shift 19 million games.

In the report, Nintendo mentioned that while games like The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker HD, Super Mario 3D World and Wii Party U had become million sellers, overall the Wii U ‘as a whole was not able to recover fully’.

There are now 5.86 million Wii U consoles out there in the world, that’s still more than the PlayStation 4 which sits on 4.2 million and the Xbox One on 3 million – that’s less impressive when you consider the Wii U has been out more than a year – scary.

The Nintendo 3DS did better but still failed to reach targets, it didn’t miss as much as the Wii U however. Nintendo had expected to sell 13.5 million Nintendo 3DS consoles, it instead sold only 11.65 million. Out of the total 3DS sales, 7.43 million of them were for the 3DS XL and the 2DS sold 2.11 million.

As for legacy systems like the DS and the Wii they’re still trucking along with 0.11 million DSi and DSi XL consoles sold where as the Wii still manager to sell another 1.07 million units.

For the 9 months ending on December 31st 2013, Nintendo’s operating income was a loss of 1.578 billion yen (17.3 million AUD). This is better than this time last year where it was 5.857 billion yen. Net income was down as well with the company only making 10.195 billion yen (112 million AUD) compared to 14.545 billion yen compared to last year.

As expected, Nintendo blamed the price markdowns of the Wii U in Europe and America for these losses. Because hardware was down, software was down as well. However, we essentially knew this would be the case due to the company’s annual forecast being revised earlier in the month.

Nintendo has also announced that it would dip into their cash reserves to buy back 125 billion yen ($1.3 billion AUD) of its shares.

Nintendo will hold its investor’s briefing tomorrow, the 30th of January at 10am local Tokyo time. That’s midday for the east coast of Australia.

These results aren’t great, but we knew they were coming. The real important stuff will be delivered tomorrow when we learn what Nintendo plan to do about it.