14 DAY TRIAL // Michael Pachter, who is an analyst with the research firm Wedbush Morgan, has issued a new note to investors highlighting the long-term prospects of Nintendo and its biggest platform, the Wii home console, the 3DS handheld and the upcoming Wii U.
The analyst says that Nintendo will not manage to meet its own sales targets when it announces earnings during the coming week.
The video game publisher and hardware developers said that it wanted to sell 13 million Wii consoles, 11 million older DS handhelds and 16 million 3DS devices during this year, figures that seem out of reach at the moment.
In the NPD Group monthly sales data the Nintendo Wii is performing worse than the Xbox 360 from Microsoft while the 3DS has seen a big slowdown in sales since the initial impressive first week performance.
Pachter says that the 3DS can rebound because Nintendo is preparing the release of “a number of applications and many strong software releases this fall.”
The release of a Netflix streaming application is an example of how Nintendo can boost the profile of its newest handheld as long as 3D movies are launched for it before the end of the year.
Michael Pachter has also talked about the Wii U, the new home console that Nintendo plans to release during next year, and says that it has a lot of potential to quickly capture market share but only as long as it is priced in a competitive way (which probably means lower) than the Xbox 360 and Kinect bundle that Microsoft will have on sale at the same time.
Pachter says Nintendo “has conceded a large first-mover advantage given the release of Kinect and Move last year.”
The Wii U is rumored to be released during the summer of 2012 and rumors put the price at under 250 dollars.