Nintendo announced on Tuesday that it will unveil details about a long-awaited new console by the end of March 2025, as sales of the popular Switch decline after eight years on the market.
Despite achieving a record net profit in the previous fiscal year, Nintendo anticipates a nearly 40 percent drop in the current fiscal year. With players and investors eagerly awaiting news about a successor to the Switch, the Japanese company confirmed that an official statement regarding the new console is on the horizon.
“We will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year,” said a post on social media platform X that was attributed to company president Shuntaro Furukawa.
In the fiscal year 2023-24, Nintendo reported a net profit of 490 billion yen ($3.2 billion), surpassing its previous record of 480 billion yen set three years ago. This achievement coincided with the rise in popularity of the Switch, which became a must-have gadget for entertainment during pandemic lockdowns.
“Good sales were posted for ‘The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’,” it said, adding that new titles in the “Super Mario Bros” and “Pikmin” series had also performed well.
The “Super Mario” movie helped sell games from the Mario franchise and there was a “substantial increase in foreign exchange gains and interest income”.
The yen has been on a downwards slide, boosting profits for companies such as Nintendo that sell goods overseas.
Nintendo anticipates a nearly 40 percent decline in net profit to 300 billion yen for the current financial year. Despite this projection, hardware sales for 2023-24 reached 15.7 million units, a drop of nearly 13 percent from the previous year. The company noted that while this decline is evident, sales remain steady for a platform in its eighth-year post-launch, referring to the Switch.
Looking ahead, Nintendo expects hardware sales to decrease further in the current financial year to 13.5 million units. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Nathan Naidu pointed out that Nintendo consoles typically have a “six-to-seven-year lifecycle,” suggesting that without a new gaming gadget, the impact on overall sales might extend into fiscal 2025.
Hideki Yasuda, an analyst at Toyo Securities, highlighted that investors have been eagerly awaiting news about the announcement of a new console.
“It would be a major disappointment if Nintendo couldn’t release it by March 2025,” he said.
