Nintendo has released their financial data regarding the first quarter of the financial year set to end in March of 2022.
Nintendo said its earnings took a slight dip for the first fiscal quarter (second calendar quarter) ended June 30. The Japanese company said its Switch hybrid console has now sold 89 million devices to date.
Both revenue and profit were down compared to a year ago, when profits were propped up for all companies due to the huge demand for games during the pandemic lockdown.
“Hardware sales totaled 4.45 million units,” Nintendo noted of the Switch in its earnings report. “Hardware and software sales in the first quarter of last fiscal year were substantially driven by the March 2020 release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, so compared to then, hardware sales were down 21.7 percent and software sales were down 10.2 percent year-on-year.”
According to Nintendo, New Horizons set an incredibly high bar after selling a whopping 22 million units by June 30, 2020, which is why net sales and profits have suffered despite hardware and software sales both remaining “steady.”
“Nintendo Switch hardware and software sales both remain steady, but overall sales declined compared to the same period of the previous fiscal year, when Animal Crossing: New Horizons was a major driver of the Nintendo Switch platform business,” said the company.
Nintendo earned an operating profit of $1.1 billion USD on revenues of $2.94 billion for the quarter ending June 30. Both are declines—of 17 percent and 10 percent, respectively—compared to the same quarter one year ago. The firm sold 4.45 million Switch consoles, a decline of 21.7 percent year-over-year (YOY). Software sales were 45.29 million units.
Nintendo expects another uptick in Switch and software sales in this and the coming quarter, thanks to the launch of a new hardware model with a bigger OLED display and some big software releases.
