9/5/2020 11:13 PM
Nintendo’s business has the corona crisis with its initial restrictions gave a strong boost. The Japanese company sold around 3.3 million of its switch game consoles last quarter – a third more than a year earlier. In the fiscal year ended at the end of March, a good 21 million switch consoles were sold – also thanks to the market launch of a cheaper version in autumn.
Due to the corona crisis, there were bottlenecks in switch production due to the lack of components, but that did not have a significant impact on the numbers, emphasized Nintendo.
“Animal Crossing” as a popular game
The new game in the “Animal Crossing” series made the best start of a switch game so far with 13.4 million sales in six weeks during the Corona period. Sales and profits also rose significantly in the usually rather bad quarter after Christmas.
Nintendo then closed the financial year with a nine percent increase in sales to 1.3 trillion yen (11.3 billion euros). The profit jumped by a third to almost 257 billion yen (2.25 billion euros), as Nintendo announced on Thursday. However, Nintendo is now expecting a good eight percent less sales and a 22 percent drop in profits for the new business year. One reason is that the crisis is dampening willingness to buy.
In the smartphone app business, in which Nintendo is very cautious not to affect console sales, revenues increased last year by 11 percent to a good 51 billion yen (446 million euros).
Nintendo has sold a total of 55.7 million devices from the Switch console since its market launch three years ago – which is also an important basis for further game sales.
(gi / dpa)
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