Nintendo Shares Drop After Switch Sales Projection Cut

Shares for the Kyoto-based company Nintendo Co experienced their biggest one-day drop in a year, recording an almost 7% decline on Tuesday following the company’s Switch sales projection cut.

The Japanese videogame company said that their production was hindered by the semiconductors shortage, resulting in only 6.68 million Switch sales in the six-month period that ended in September from 8.28 million a year prior.

With the industry heading towards the crucial year-end holiday season, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa said that the moderate recovery of chip supply had boosted the production of Switch during recent months.

“There is a gradual improvement in semiconductor and other component supplies and a recovery trend in hardware manufacturing,” The Japanese video game company said.

Despite the good news, Nintendo cut its Switch sales projection to only 19 million for the business year ending in March 2023 from its prior forecast of 21 million.

Nintendo surpasses 114m Switch sales, 800m mobile app downloads

Nintendo’s latest earnings report confirmed that its total Switch sales had reached a whopping 114.33 million. The Kyoto-based company said that the demand for consoles remains stable despite the 19.2% drop in Switch sales in Q2.

President Shuntaro Furukawa also shared that the Nintendo mobile apps had surpassed 800 million downloads, with the mobile game Fire Emblem Heroes being the most profitable app.

Shuntaro said, “As of the end of October 2022, the number of unique downloads across all our mobile apps totaled more than 800 million.”

“This figure, 800 million, is equivalent to the cumulative unit sales total of all Nintendo hardware since we launched Nintendo Entertainment System (Famicom) in 1983. The mobile business has seen those same numbers in just the six and a half years since 2016, when we released our first app,” Shintaro clarified.

Aside from Fire Emblem Heroes, Nintendo mobile apps consist of Super Mario Run, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, Pikmin Bloom, and Dragalia Lost, with the latter due to close its servers this month.