Nintendo Posts Operating Loss for Second Year in a row

by Daniel VuckovicApril 24, 2013

For the second year in row Nintendo has made an operating loss, even with the release of the Wii U.

Nintendo had an operating loss of 36.4 billion yen ($357 million) for the 2012 finical year which ended in March this year. This is worse than Nintendo had announced in January when 20 billion yen was predicted. Soft game and hardware sales were to blame. Operating incoming is how much a company earns after expenses.

However net income for the company was better with the company having a gain this year, net incoming is the amount of money a company makes without accounting for expenses. Nintendo had a net income of 7 billion yen or 68 million dollars. The Japanese Yen weakening will continue to help Nintendo in the future but it will eventually need to sell more hardware and software to make money.

The Wii U did not make its sales target of 4 million sales in the past finical year but instead fell short at 3.45 million. Sales were slow in the last quarter of the financial year with only 400,000 Wii U units sold worldwide. Nintendo now plans to sell 9 million (more) units by the end March 2014.

The 3DS is doing much better with 18 million predicted this finical year, that should bring the total of 3DS units sold to 49 million if the target is reached. No targets for the Nintendo DS were given but Nintendo hopes to sell 2 million Wii consoles which should bring it over the 100 million units mark. It is currently sitting on 99.84 million. So close.

Naturally Nintendo told investors how it plans to get back on the track to making money and this not only by releasing new games and hardware but “communicating the compelling nature of our hardware and software to as many people as possible through our new network service called Miiverse”. Nintendo will actually have to put Miiverse on more than the Wii U to do that though.

Nintendo also has plans to reduce costs of manufacturing the Wii U and 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’.

On the Nintendo 3Ds side of business Nintendo is betting big on Pokemon X and Y as well as Animal Crossing. Nintendo also is hoping to help out Japanese developers by ‘more actively support(ing) the Japanese software developers in distributing their key titles overseas’. Good news for us too then.

Nintendo has also updated its top selling charts for Wii U, 3DS, DS and Wii software and hardware. We’ve included them below.