Nintendo Misses Profit Expectations by Half

From DailyTech: Nintendo was betting on the Wii U for help in the sales department, but it looks like the new console has disappointed so far -- and it shows in the company's latest earnings report.

For the fiscal year ended March 31, Nintendo posted a year-over-year sales drop of 1.9 percent to 635.4 billion yen ($6.4 billion USD). The company was originally hoping for 670 billion yen.

Nintendo was able to report a small profit of 7 billion yen, but that's only half of the 14 billion yen that it had previously predicted. The gaming company also saw a wider operating loss than expected, coming in at 36.4 billion yen instead of the projected 20 billion yen.

Many are blaming the Wii U gaming console for Nintendo's lower-than-expected figures. Only 3.45 million Wii Us were sold worldwide for the last fiscal year, which just missed Nintendo's projection of 4 million sales. About 13.42 million units of software sold for the new console as well. The company sold 3.98 million original Wiis and 13.95 million 3DS handheld units.

"For the 'Wii U' system, launched in the fiscal year ended March 31, 2013, there were some delays in software development that resulted in intervals between new software title releases at the early stage of this year," said Nintendo. "Taking this into consideration, for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2014, we plan to concentrate on proactively releasing key Nintendo titles from the second half of this year through next year in order to regain momentum for the platform.

"We also strive to reduce costs to improve hardware profitability."

Nintendo expects a profit surge from the 7 billion yen this year to 55 billion yen next year (March 31, 2014) thanks to new games for the Wii U.

In January of this year, Nintendo had announced that it was cutting its Wii U sales targets from 5.5 million to 4 million by March 2013. At that time, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata explained that Wii U sales were lower because of the popularity of mobile devices for gaming and the fact that this is the first time Nintendo has released two versions of a console at once.

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