Slump comes in
Submitted by Gaming Briefs and Nostalgia Bits
Nintendo and other such companies are now experiencing sales decline:
TOKYO (AP) - Brandname Japanese technology companies, including Nintendo, reported dismal earnings Thursday with Sharp emerging an exception in doubling profits on brisk sales of flat-panel TVs in China, Japan and the U.S.
Nintendo’s first-half profit plunged as sales of its blockbuster Wii home console lost momentum in a saturated market. The maker of Super Mario and Pokemon games now expects annual earnings to fall for the first time in six years.
Kyoto-based Nintendo Co. reported a 69.49 billion yen ($772 million) profit for the April-September period, down 52 percent from a year earlier, and trailed its own May forecast for a 100 billion yen profit. Fiscal first-half sales dropped 34.5 percent to 548.01 billion yen.
The article does suggest though that it’s not as bad as it sounds:
Profit outlooks with the exception of Nintendo were unchanged or a little less pessimistic.
[...]
Hitachi said it now expects a narrower loss of 230 billion yen ($2.5 billion). It had initially expected a 270 billion yen loss, which would still have been better than its 787 billion yen loss for the fiscal year ended March.
But Nintendo, which had been booming for the last several years, lowered its projections, citing the erosion to revenue from a recent Wii price cut as well as the strong yen, which reduces the value of overseas earnings of Japanese exporters.
Nintendo said it will earn a 230 billion yen ($2.5 billion) profit - the first time in six years it’s predicting earnings to fall.
Nintendo reaped a record 279.1 billion yen profit for the fiscal year ended March, and had initially hoped to improve to a 300 billion yen ($3.3 billion) profit this year.
Maybe their current slump isn’t a total disaster, but it still symbolizes what the recession has led to.
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