Kyoto Nintendo is gearing up for fewer sales of its Switch game console. The video games specialist expects to sell 21 million devices for the fiscal year ending March 2023.
In addition, the Group has announced a stock split. This will take effect at a ratio of 10: 1 on October 1, as Nintendo announced. The shares have risen by five percent over the course of the year so far.
In the past financial year, Nintendo was slowed down by chip bottlenecks and just managed to double the forecast of 23 million consoles.
The consoles are the basis of the Nintendo business: the traditional Japanese company continues to make its popular game characters such as Super Mario available only to a very limited extent away from its own devices, for example on smartphones. The switch, which customers can use both on TV and on the go, was a much-needed hit for Nintendo after the flop of the predecessor Wii U.
Since the launch of the console five years ago, 107.6 million devices have been sold. At the end of the fiscal year, Nintendo had 102 million active players, up from 87 million twelve months earlier.
Nintendo gets through crisis better than Sony
At the same time, a declining sales curve for the Switch is emerging, even if chip problems played a significant part in it last year. After 28.8 million Switch consoles sold in the fiscal year to the end of March 2021, it was initially expected to reach 25.5 million last year.
But then the forecast was reduced first to 24 million, and later to 23 million. Nintendo is still coming through the crisis better than its competitor Sony, which was only able to sell 11.5 million units of its new Playstation 5 console last financial year – with a forecast of 14.8 million.
Sales fell by 3.6 percent last financial year to just under 1.7 trillion yen (about 12.3 billion euros), Nintendo announced on Tuesday. Profit remained stable at 477.6 billion yen. For the current fiscal year, Nintendo expects sales to fall to 1.6 trillion yen and significantly less profit to 340 billion yen.
