14 DAY TRIAL // Satoru Iwata, the president of Nintendo, has recently met with shareholders to present an update on the financial outlook of the Japanese console maker and videogames developer. He pointed out the success of third party titles developed for the games platforms created by Nintendo and offered some sales numbers that the company aims for in the fiscal year of 2008.
Iwata first noted the stronger than expected sales of both the DS and the Wii in the year of 2007. 30.31 million units of Nintendo DS handhelds were sold, which is about 800,000 more than the company thought it would ship, while Nintendo Wii sales were slightly ahead of forecasts too, at 18.61 million units sold worldwide. Even as some analysts claim that the Japanese market, where Nintendo enjoys great sales numbers and a traditional dominance, is slowing down, which could hurt Nintendo in the future, the company says that its presence in North America and especially Europe more than makes up for the possible saturation of the Japanese market.
The software sales are also impressive. 185.62 million DS titles, the highest ever total for one year on a single platform, were sold in 2007 and 119.60 million Wii titles made it to customers in the same period. And Iwata does not see these numbers going down in the current year.
For the fiscal year which ends in March 2009, the analysts at Nintendo are expecting that the company will ship 29 million Nintendo DS hardware units and some 187 million DS software units. These estimates are on the conservative side, as some analysts see the games sales for the Nintendo going well over the 200 million mark. On the Wii side things are even sunnier as Nintendo thinks that 25 million hardware units will get shipped in 2008 and about 177 million software units will be sold.
Satoru Iwata also remarked that while currently Nintendo made titles, such as Wii Fit or Wii Sports, are the highest sellers at the moment and that the Nintendo created games also top the sales charts, it seems that third party titles will continue to grow in 2008, with the launch of WiiWare being an excellent opportunity to make third party developers more interested in developing for the Wii console.