Nintendo Co shares fell the most in two months in Tokyo trading yesterday after SMBC Nikko Securities Inc cut its recommendation and said it now expects the company’s entry into smartphone games would not make full contributions to revenue until the fiscal year ending March 2018.
Nintendo shares dropped 7.6 percent in Tokyo yesterday, the biggest decline since Oct. 29 last year. The benchmark TOPIX fell 1.1 percent.
Operating income for the fiscal year starting April 1 would probably be about ¥30 billion yen (US$253.28 million) — less than half the previous estimate — because of reduced sales volume for Nintendo’s 3DS handheld video-game player and revised assumptions about smartphone games, SMBC Nikko analyst Eiji Maeda wrote in a report released on Tuesday.
He lowered his rating on the shares to “underperform” from “neutral.”
Nintendo has previously delayed the debut of its joint project with online games platform operator DeNA Co. While the company owns intellectual property including the games Mario and Zelda, the first game will be a free-to-play messaging-based app called Miitomo, which is to have a “few in-game charges,” Maeda wrote.
Nintendo shares rose 33 percent last year, fueled by its March announcement that the company was entering the smartphone game market. Earlier last year, the stock was up as much as 80 percent before the smartphone delays raised doubts about its ability to compete in the fast-moving, competitive market for free-to-play games.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained