Nintendo on lowering Switch hardware forecast, wants to further enrich software lineup
This information comes from the Q&A portion of Nintendo’s latest financial results briefing…
Regarding the downward revision of the Nintendo Switch hardware unit sales forecast for this fiscal year, what is different now compared to your expectations at the start of this fiscal year? Iʼd also like to know how many units you intend to sell in the coming fiscal year, and your sales strategy for doing so.
Shuntaro Furukawa (President and Representative Director): This holiday season, we were able to release three major titles (Super Mario Party, Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu!/Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee!, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate), and were able to grow our year-on-year hardware sales in every region.
Yet despite having been able to sell fairly large volume of hardware during the holiday season, it is true that we now do not anticipate reaching the forecasted 12-month sales volume set at the beginning of this fiscal year. As we look back so far (for this fiscal year), we now evaluate that our efforts to fully convey the appeal of Nintendo Switch hardware and software to the number of new consumers we originally hoped to reach were insufficient.
And from the viewpoint of our full-year unit sales forecast for this fiscal year, while we expected that releasing titles during the holiday season would help to increase sales, the year-on-year sales increase during the first half of the fiscal year (April to September) turned out not big enough, which also affected the revision of the unit forecast as we looked back now.
We will talk about the next fiscal year in more detail at a later time, but basically we want to further increase both our hardware and software unit sales more than this fiscal year. We want to further enrich our software lineup and convey its appeal to consumers, so that they decide this (calendar) year they would buy Nintendo Switch.
