Nintendo today shared their financial results for the fiscal year ending 31st March 2015, revealing that, as pledged by Satoru Iwata, the company was able to report a full-year profit.
That has been an important reversal of fortune, after Nintendo have suffered overall financial losses for the past three years. However, last fiscal year saw the company’s net income at 41.8 billion yen (£230 million) from revenues of 550 billion yen (£3.03 billion), surpassing estimates that they would report a 30 billion yen (£165 million) profit.
There’s still some cause for concern, after Nintendo 3DS hardware sales performed below expectation. That may partly be attributed to the New Nintendo 3DS launching fairly late in the west, but early interest is strong with 820,000 New Nintendo 3DS systems sold in Europe, and 1.11 million New Nintendo 3DS XL systems in Europe and North America between mid-February up until the end of March.
Software sales similarly fell slightly to 62.74 million units, with Nintendo anticipating that this will continue to fall in the new fiscal year. Pokémon Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire, Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D were strong performers, selling 9.94 million, 6.75 million and more than 2 million copies each worldwide.
It was the Wii U that surged forward, increased interest seeing hardware sales climb to 3.38 million systems worldwide – an increase over the 2.72 million achieved the year before. Software sales also grew to 24.4 million copies sold, largely spurred by Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U that achieved sales of 5.11 million and 3.65 million copies respectively worldwide.
