“Nintendo Co Ltd posted a sharp drop in quarterly profit and forecast a bigger-than-expected full-year loss, its first at an operating level, as it battles a strong yen and its games devices lose ground to gadgets such as Apple’s iPhone,” Yoshiyuki Osada and Isabel Reynolds report for Reuters.
“Nintendo now expects an annual operating loss of 45 billion yen ($575 million), dwarfing expectations of a 4.2 billion yen loss, based on the average of 21 analyst forecasts,” Osada and Reynolds report. “Nintendo cut its forecast for annual sales of its ageing Wii console to 10 million devices from 12 million, and for the 3DS handheld games device to 14 million from 16 million.”
Osada and Reynolds report, “The company plans to launch the Wii’s successor, the Wii U, in Japan, the United States, Europe and Australia in the year-end season, Iwata told reporters. But with cloud-based gaming emerging as a potential threat, Nintendo may have trouble generating excitement about its new product, some analysts say… Apple is thought to be preparing a new iPad and possibly a smart TV that could be game-changers for the industry. ‘We think we need to consider the possibility that home consoles could become a thing of the past,’ Citigroup analyst Soichiro Fukuda wrote in a recent report. ‘We think the direction taken by marketing trendsetter Apple will be very important and we will be watching the company’s announcements at future events with interest.'”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
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