Nintendo reported today that it missed earnings targets for its third fiscal quarter ending December 31, largely because the Japanese video game company didn’t launch any major hits during the popular holiday selling season.
The Kyoto, Japan-based video game company reported net income of 29.1 billion yen, or $241.3 million. Nintendo was expected to report 33.2 billion yen ($275 million) in net income for the quarter, according to FactSet, up slightly from 31.8 billion yen ($263 million) a year earlier.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1869896,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"B"}']Actual revenues for the quarter were 221.5 billion yen, or $1.83 billion. Revenues were expected to be 252.6 billion yen ($2.1 billion) for the October to December period, down 7 percent from 271.5 billion yen ($2.2 billion) a year earlier.
Still, the company made money, and the results for the holiday quarter showed the power of Nintendo’s brands and games even when it doesn’t have a top-rated game console on the market. Nintendo maintained its full-year profits for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2016. The company expects an operating profit of 50 billion yen on revenues of 570 billion yen.
In the last three months of 2015, Nintendo sold 1.87 million Wii U consoles and 3.6 million 3DS units. By comparison, Sony has sold an estimated 36 million units to date of its PlayStation 4 console, and Microsoft has sold an estimated 19 million Xbox One consoles.
In the last nine months, the Wii U console sold just 3 million units of hardware and 22 million copies of software. The Wii U video game console sold 12.6 million units of hardware and 79.3 million copies of software to date. The top seller in the past nine months on the Wii U is Splatoon, which has sold 4 million copies.
The 3DS sold 5.9 million units of hardware and 38 million copies of software in the past nine months. 3DS hardware sales have topped 57.94 million units to date while software sales are at 264.53 million. The top seller in the past nine months on the 3DS was Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer, which has sold more than 2.9 million copies.
For the nine months, Nintendo reported net income of 40.56 billion yen ($3.36 million) on revenue of 425.6 yen ($3.53 billion), compared with net income of 59.5 billion yen on revenue of 442.9 billion yen a year earlier.
Nintendo is expected to launch its first smartphone game, Miitomo, with Japanese mobile-game publisher DeNA in March.
Nintendo has had a hard time keeping up with supplies of the Amiibo, the chip-based figurines that can sync with its games.
[aditude-amp id="medium1" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1869896,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"B"}']
And the Japanese company has been trickling out information on its new game console, codenamed NX, which is expected to be unveiled at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in June 2016.