Nintendo enters the red as Wii U sales stall prompting £135m loss
JAPANESE game maker Nintendo ended the last business year with its third straight loss, but yesterday said new video games would revive sales and return it to profit.
Nintendo’s Wii U console missed projections shipping only 2.72m units, far short of Nintendo’s original 9m projection, due to a paucity of games for the console, sending the firm to a loss of 23.2bn yen (£135m) last year.
Despite sales slipping 10 per cent to 571.7bn yen last year, Nintendo forecasts a 3.2 per cent growth in revenue during the year ending March 2015 to 590bn yen with profits of 40bn yen. “We’ve set the forecast at a somewhat conservative level,” Nintendo’s chief executive Satoru Iwata said.
Poor sales of the Wii U since its December 2012 release have led analysts to question the long-term prospects of the video game industry, but rival consoles launched by Sony and Microsoft over the past six months have seen far higher sales quashing such doubt. Nintendo’s shares fell 2.73 per cent following the results to 10,670 yen.