CEO Tatsumi Kimishima mentioned today during Nintendo's quarterly financial briefing that the company predicts to ship two million units in the console’s launch month of March 2017, in addition to releasing sales data for the Wii U and 3DS.
He went on to state that the company doesn’t intend to sell the Switch at a loss, but it’s listening to consumer expectations during the process of setting the price, and expressed confidence that consumers will understand the difference between the new device and the 3DS. Kimishima also confirmed an earlier report that the company isn’t planning to announce either specs or price before the end of the year.
Financial results were released during the meeting today as well, indicating that 340,000 Wii U units and 1.78 million 3DS units have been shipped between July 1 and September 30. Nintendo provided a statement via press release, including an in-depth analysis of the results for the quarter:
"During the six months ended September 30, 2016, we saw strong trends for the global release of Kirby: Planet Robobot. On the hardware side, Nintendo 2DS saw sales growth. The release of the smart device application Pokémon GO led to increased sales of software in the Pokémon series released in the past and drove the Nintendo 3DS family hardware sales growth, particularly outside of Japan. The sales volume for hardware this period was 2.71 million units (19% increase on a year- on-year basis) , while software held steady with the previous year at 19.23 million units sold.
For the Wii U console, we have decided to ship 0.8 million units this fiscal year, based on our forecasts of comprehensive demand for Nintendo hardware. Activity has conformed to our expectations from the start of the fiscal year, with hardware sales volume of 0.56 million units (53% decrease on a year-on-year basis).
There were no hit titles this period to compare with Splatoon and Super Mario Maker last year, so the software sales were 8.3 million units (33% decrease on a year-on-year basis). As there were few new software titles offering amiibo functionality, amiibo sales were reduced to 3.8 million units for figure-type and 1.7 million units for card-type. In addition, there were relatively fewer offerings of downloadable content during this period, so download sales were down on the same period last year.
Along with this background, we felt the impacts of a strengthening yen, resulting in an operating loss of 5.9 billion yen against net sales of 136.8 billion yen (of which overseas sales were 97.3 billion yen or 71.1% of the total sales). We have also included 12.0 billion yen of share of profit of entities accounted for using the equity method related to The Pokémon Company and other companies, but we incurred foreign exchange losses totaling 39.9 billion yen, resulting in an ordinary loss of 30.8 billion yen.
However, due to the sale of part of our ownership in the company that manages the Seattle Mariners Major League Baseball team, we recorded gain on sales of investment securities totaling 62.7 billion yen as extraordinary income, meaning that profit attributable to owners of parent was 38.2 billion yen."
An image was also provided:
The Nintendo Switch is expected to release March 2017. Will it follow in the footsteps of its predecessor? Comment what you think below.
