Nintendo has announced it will be raising its operating profit forecast, despite falling short of analyst predictions, as the company continues to create popular games for its six-year-old Switch console.
The gaming giant announced on Tuesday (7 October) that it would be raising its operating profit forecast by 11% from $2.9bn to $3.32bn for the financial year ending March 2024. The forecast fell short of analyst predictions which sat at $3.5bn.
Go deeper with GlobalData
The rise in Nintendo’s profit forecast comes alongside the rise of its game sale forecast, which increased by 3% to 185 million, based on the company expecting to sell 5 million more units.
Nintendo had a number of popular releases this year, as the industry enjoys a plethora of heavy hitting games following the easing of pandemic disruption.
The long-awaited “Tears of the Kingdom” game on Switch sold 19.5 million copies as of the end of September, according to Nintendo. In just three days the game sold a whopping 10 million copies.
Speaking on a conference call after the earnings release, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa claimed the Switch console is “different from past hardware”.
US Tariffs are shifting - will you react or anticipate?
Don’t let policy changes catch you off guard. Stay proactive with real-time data and expert analysis.
By GlobalData“It has the ability to give rise to different kinds of new demand,” he said.
The company kept its outlook for the six-year-old Switch hardware at 15 million units, despite Furukawa claiming it would be hard to accomplish.
The gaming software market was worth $197bn in 2021 and will become
a $470bn industry by 2030, according to GlobalData estimates.
This estimates an increase at a compound annual growth rate of 10% over the period, the research company forecasted.
Cloud gaming will be the fastest growing segment in the industry, expanding
from approximately $2bn in 2021 to more than $30bn by 2030 at a CAGR of 39%, according to GlobalData.
