Hit by the decline in Wii sales, a strong yen and the disruption to the launch of its 3DS portable console in Japan caused by the March 11 earthquake, Nintendo announced a profit of 77.62 billion yen ($945 million) for the year to March 31. Revenue fell nearly 30 percent to 1.014 trillion yen, following a 22 percent drop last year.
This is the second straight year of falling revenue and profit for the Kyoto-based firm, which posted net income of 228.64 billion yen for the year to March 2010, itself a drop of 18 percent. Nevertheless, Nintendo did manage to stay in the black throughout the global slowdown.
In a three-sentence statement on its website, media-shy Nintendo announced it "has decided to launch in 2012 a system to succeed Wii" and that it "will show a playable model of the new system and announce more specifications at the E3 Expo" in Los Angeles June 7-9.
The 3DS, the glasses-free 3D portable console that was launched at the end of February in Japan, and at the end of March elsewhere, missed Nintendo’s global sales target of 4 million units, racking up 3.61 million by the end of March.
Although the earthquake in Japan has affected nearly every industry, it doesn’t explain all of the 3DS’ lackluster sales: the new console has been outsold by Sony’s seven-year-old PSP for the last few weeks in Japan. A slim line-up of games for the 3DS launch is being blamed for low consumer interest.
Nintendo is forecasting a profit of 110 billion yen for the year to March 2012, although the company is famously conservative in its financial predictions.
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Source-THR
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