The launch of the Wii U console from Nintendo is looking like it will be a big financial drag for the Japanese company, but Nintendo still manged to bring in a profit for the first quarter of its 2013 fiscal year (the second quarter of the calendar year 2013).
Nintendo"s press release stated it generated a profit of 8.62 billion yen, or close to $88 million, for the quarter, even though its revenues actually went down by 3.8 percent year-to-year. Nintendo said its profits were due in part to currency exchange gains, along with profits from selling its portable 3DS console.
Nintendo"s Wii U, which launched in November 2012 in the US, only shipped 160,000 units in the last quarter, which is below the 390,000 units it shipped in the previous quarter. Nintendo put the blame on the lack of "key first-party titles" for the Wii U. The company insists they will solve this problem with major new Wii U first party games in the second half of 2013 and 2014.
However, Nintendo is also predicting that it will ship a total of 9 million Wii U units in its current fiscal year. That sounds incredibly optimistic considering that it has only shipped a fraction of that amount so far. Nintendo also doesn"t seem to consider that Microsoft and Sony both have their own next generation console launches that will almost certainly generate more interest than the Wii U will toward the end of this year.
Source: Nintendo | Image via Nintendo