Nintendo has been unable to arrest a slide in console sales as more people play games on smartphones and tablets. The company’s apparent solution? A move into healthcare.
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata yesterday vowed to stick to the company’s old ways and refused to resign or cut product prices despite its dismal earnings, but said the video game maker will enter the healthcare industry.
Iwata did not give details of what he called his “quality of life” business plans, except that it would not be a wearable device.
Kyoto-based Nintendo already offers fitness games. Iwata promised to disclose details later this year.
Iwata displayed his typical stubbornness in brushing off criticism about how the maker of Super Mario and Pokemon games should update itself for the era of smartphone and other mobile devices.
The popularity of such devices has been drawing consumers away from consoles devoted to games, but Nintendo has resisted changing its business to incorporate tablets and smartphones.
“Nintendo has value because it is different from others,” Iwata said at a Tokyo event for analysts and reporters, a day after he and other top executives took a pay cut for the company’s poor performance.
Nintendo on Wednesday reported a ￥10.2 billion (US$99 million) profit for April through December, down from ￥14.55 billion a year earlier as sales of Wii U home consoles and 3DS hand-held devices languished. It did not break down quarterly numbers.
Nintendo has slashed its annual forecast for Wii U sales from 9 million units to just 2.8 million, fewer than a third of its earlier estimate.
Earlier this month, the company forecast a loss of ￥25 billion for the fiscal year through March 2014.
Nintendo had earlier forecast a profit of ￥55 billion.
The company’s shares fell 4.3 percent to ￥12,325 yesterday.
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
BYPASSING CHINA TARIFFS: In the first five months of this year, Foxconn sent US$4.4bn of iPhones to the US from India, compared with US$3.7bn in the whole of last year Nearly all the iPhones exported by Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) from India went to the US between March and last month, customs data showed, far above last year’s average of 50 percent and a clear sign of Apple Inc’s efforts to bypass high US tariffs imposed on China. The numbers, being reported by Reuters for the first time, show that Apple has realigned its India exports to almost exclusively serve the US market, when previously the devices were more widely distributed to nations including the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. During March to last month, Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry
PLANS: MSI is also planning to upgrade its service center in the Netherlands Micro-Star International Co (MSI, 微星) yesterday said it plans to set up a server assembly line at its Poland service center this year at the earliest. The computer and peripherals manufacturer expects that the new server assembly line would shorten transportation times in shipments to European countries, a company spokesperson told the Taipei Times by telephone. MSI manufactures motherboards, graphics cards, notebook computers, servers, optical storage devices and communication devices. The company operates plants in Taiwan and China, and runs a global network of service centers. The company is also considering upgrading its service center in the Netherlands into a
Taiwan’s property market is entering a freeze, with mortgage activity across the nation’s six largest cities plummeting in the first quarter, H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) said yesterday, citing mounting pressure on housing demand amid tighter lending rules and regulatory curbs. Mortgage applications in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung totaled 28,078 from January to March, a sharp 36.3 percent decline from 44,082 in the same period last year, the nation’s largest real-estate brokerage by franchise said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC, 聯徵中心). “The simultaneous decline across all six cities reflects just how drastically the market
RSS