With a new revision and three major releases for the holiday, Nintendo’s third quarter financial results have yielded some bonkers numbers, as well as revisions in both directions and some milestones are in sight.
US dollar totals for comparison only, amounts in yen: based on rate of 114.775 yen = USD$1
Financial Indicators
Revenue: ¥695.928bn (~US$6.063bn) – 2019 was 578.701bn while 2020 was 634.939bn
Operating income: ¥252.541bn (~US$2.01b) – 2019 168.707bn, 2020 229.674bn
Ordinary income: ¥277.414bn (~US$2.417b) – 2019 188.688bn, 2020 230.734bn
Digital sales: ¥110.8bn (~US$965m) – 2019 53.2bn, 2020 84.5bn
Mobile/IP revenue: ¥14.3bn (~US$124m) – 2019 17bn, 2020 15.3bn
Hardware Shipments
The Switch platform collectively has become the third best selling platform in Nintendo history, with 10.67m units shipped in the quarter for a new lifetime total of 103.54m units. The next platform, the Game Boy / Game Boy Color, is 15.15m shipments away.
As the first quarter for the Switch OLED, the breakdown was 5.34m standard Switches, 3.99m OLED models, and 1.34m Lites. Life to date for the standard Switch is 81.68m systems and the Lite 17.87m units.
Software Shipments
All four of Nintendo’s releases in the quarter shipped more than a million units. Pokemon Brilliant Diamond / Shining Pearl led the way with 13.97m units, leaping into the top 10 sellers on Switch and trailing only Omega Ruby / Alpha Sapphire (14.46) and the Let’s Go games (combined 14.33m) on the “Pokemon remake” charts. Mario Party Superstars shipped 5.43m units, while Metroid Dread opened with a quarter of 2.74m – although Dread is not the best selling title in the series yet, it only trails Metroid Prime by 100k copies. Big Brain Academy: Brain v Brain opened with 1.28m shipments.
For catalogue sales, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe shipped 4.61m units in the quarter for a new lifetime total of 43.35m. Animal Crossing: New Horizons shipped 2.77m (37.62m life to date), Super Smash Bros Ultimate 1.69m (27.4m), Breath of the Wild 1.67m (25.8m), Pokemon Sword/Shield 1.26m (23.9m, second best selling pair passing Gold and Silver’s 23.73m), Mario Odyssey 1.07m (23.02m), Super Mario Party 910k (17.39m), and Ring Fit Adventure 1.32m (13.53m). Aside from Let’s Go and Super Mario Party, all of the top 10 games on Switch shipped more than a million copies in the quarter.
Other News
Nintendo has revised estimates again with this release: hardware has been revised downward to 23m (from 24m last quarter and 25m at the start of the fiscal year) due to the still-ongoing semiconductor shortage. Despite this, the projections for revenue, profit, and software sales have all been increased; the latter likely due to Pokemon Legends: Arceus shipping more than 1.4m copies in its opening week in Japan per Famitsu magazine.
