Nintendo Takes a Major Financial Hit

Nintendo has confirmed that they've slashed the number of expected sales of the Wii U and 3DS by the end of the financial year. President Satoru Iwata explained in a press release that the company now predicts to sell 2.8 million Wii U consoles by the end of March instead of 9 million as originally predicted and the Nintendo 3DS is projected to sell 13.5 million instead of 18 million. 

This new prediction has had a domino effect, changing Nintendo projected profit of 55 billion yen to a 25 billion yen lost. Iwata explained that despite the price cuts and hardware bundles of the Wii U sales in the western markets fell short stating that "sales in the US and European markets in which we entered the year-end sales season with a hardware markdown were significantly lower than our original forecasts, with both hardware and software sales experiencing a huge gap from their targets". 

"In addition, we did not assume at the beginning of the fiscal year that we would perform a markdown for the Wii U hardware in the US and European markets. This was also one of the reasons for lower sales and profit estimates". 

Shockingly the Nintendo 3DS didn't sell as expected. Iwata explained that "Nintendo 3DS did not reach our sales targets in the overseas markets, and we were ultimately unable to achieve our goal of providing a massive sales boost to Nintendo 3DS in the year-end sales season". Although 3DS sales in the US were very high the forecast sales fell short of Nintendo's expectations. 

Until the end of the fiscal year we won't have a full report of Nintendo's financial information, but according to Nintendo it isn't going to be good. I guess the Year of Luigi wasn't as good for Nintendo as it was for Luigi.

Adam Siddiqui, NoobFeed
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