It’s been a three-year wait but it’s been well worth it. Japanese game maker Nintendo – has beaten market expectations – by turning its highest first quarter sales since 2012 and also an operating profit of Ą1.1 billion ($9.3 million). Analysts were predicting losses between $1 million and $ 50 million for the quarter which ended on 30 June 2015. That’s a remarkable turnaround compared to the Ą9.4 billion operating loss at the same time last year.
What helped yank it out of the mess it got into was, the rise in sales of its Amiibo figurines, Nintendo 3DS console and games. Its bottomline got a boost from the 1.26 million units that its May-end released squid-based shooter game Splatoon for the Wii U sold in the quarter. Some 1 million 3DS players also found custom during the quarter.
While this is good news, the bad tidings are that its Wii U sales are slipping. It hawked 470,000 units in the latest quarter as against 510,000 in the previous corresponding year’s quarter. Nintendo expects to sell 3.4 million units of the Wii U by end March 2016. Thus, the Wii U has cumulatively managed to sell 14.7 million units since its debut 30 months ago as against Sony’s Playstation 4 which achieved the 10 million mark in just 12 months.
Overall, Nintendo notched up sales Ą90.2 billion ($727 million) for the quarter as compared to expectations of Ą78.3 billion yen. A weaker yen helped it add Ą10.8 billion to its operating income in the quarter.
The Kyoto-(Japan) based games company is developing a new console with the cryptic name of NX. And it has announced a partnership with DeNA to create casual games. Nintendo watchers are awaiting the announcement of a replacement for its visionary president Satoru Iwata who ran the company from 2002 and passed away recently.
