Another Year of Losses as Nintendo Records Poor Wii U Sales

With Nintendo releasing their latest financial earnings report on Wednesday, things are certainly not looking good for the Japan based corporation especially its year-old gaming console – the Wii U. The gaming console which was the successor to the highly successful Wii, which outsold the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, could only manage to attract 2.4million unit sales. This was during the nine month period leading up to December, which is a 36% drop from the previous year’s sales.
These sales figures are certainly way below the predicted 9 million units set by Nintendo. This underperformance by the Wii U was widely expected due to the release of the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 in November. The two gaming consoles dominated holiday sales causing Nintendo to manage to shift only 1.95M units, in spite of selling 3.06M units over the previous holiday period. To date the console maker has managed to ship 5.86M Wii Us. This is an impressive figure but what is worrying is the fact that Sony and Microsoft have already sold more than 7 million units of their respective consoles within a 3-month period.
These weak sales have caused Nintendo’s revenue to drop by 8.1% to $4.8B, with the company acknowledging that the Wii U is negatively impacting their revenues. To make matters worse, Nintendo has now predicted sales of only 400, 000 units of Wii U during the first quarter of 2014. Satoru Iwata, the company’s CEO, acknowledged that they have to evaluate opportunities in other areas such as the mobile market but that we’ll just have to wait and see.