Nintendo’s first-half profit plunged by more than half as sales of its hit Wii home console fizzled in a saturated market, forcing the maker of Super Mario and Pokemon games to slash its forecast for the full year.
The recent global price cut for the Wii also hurt Nintendo Co, which yesterday reported a ¥69.49 billion (US$772 million) profit for the April-September period.
That was down 52 percent from ¥144.83 billion a year earlier and trailed its May forecast for a ¥100 billion (US$1.1 billion) profit. Fiscal first-half sales fell 34.5 percent to ¥548.01 billion (US$6.1 billion).
Kyoto-based Nintendo lowered its forecast for the full fiscal year to a ¥230 billion profit from ¥300 billion, blaming the Wii price cut as well as a strong yen, which hurt Japanese exporters.
The company had banked on an exchange rate of ¥100 against the US dollar but revised that to ¥90, about the rate the currency has hovered lately.
Nintendo, which did not break down quarterly numbers, said it sold 5.75 million Wii machines worldwide during the period, far short of the more than 10 million sold for the six months last year.
Nintendo reduced the Wii price to US$200 from US$250 in the US and to ¥20,000 from ¥25,000 in Japan. But the Wii has already been the best-selling home game machine, and a similarly timed price cut on rival Sony’s PlayStation 3 to about US$300 has done more to boost that machine’s global sales.
The Wii is now about the same price as Microsoft’s low-end Xbox 360 Arcade. The price on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Elite was cut to about $300 in August.
Nintendo said it hoped to sell 20 million Wii machines during the fiscal year through March — highlighting its ambitions to woo buyers during the critical year-end holiday season with the lower price and the promise of attractive new game software.
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