Nintendo Posts Massive Profits

The company's yearly report card comes in.

Nintendo today announced its results for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2009. The company posted sales of more than 1.83 trillion yen (US $18.6 billion) and operating profits of more than 555 billion yen (US $5.6 billion). Nintendo also announced worldwide sales of close to 26 million Wiis and more than 31 million Nintendo DS systems in the past fiscal year. Nintendo has now sold over 50 million Wiis and over 100 million DS systems. Fiscal year retail software sales also rose for each platform from the previous year, reaching 197 million units for Nintendo DS, and over 204 million for Wii.

In terms of individual titles, Pokemon Platinum sold 3.75 million units in the last fiscal year, and Kirby Super Star Ultra sold 2.36 million units. The Brain Training games continued to sell well, totaling 7.31 million units in the last fiscal year and 31.12 million units in their life-to-date. On Wii, Mario Kart Wii sold 15.4 million units, Animal Crossing: City Folk sold 3.38 million units and Wii Music sold 2.65 million units. Unsurprisingly, Wii Fit was the biggest success of the year, selling 16.37 million units. There are now 91 million selling games on DS (up from 57) and 54 on Wii (up from 26).

The full figures for Nintendo's year on year performance are as follows. Sales rose 9.9% from the previous fiscal year, up to 1,838,622 million yen (US $18.6 billion), operating profit rose 14%, up to 555,263 yen (US $5.6 billion), recurring profit saw a small increase, up 1.8% to 448,695 (US $4.5 billion), while net profit rose 8.5% to 279,089 yen (US $2.8 billion).

For the fiscal year that kicked off on April 1, 2009, Nintendo is projecting that it will sell another 26 million Wii systems and 220 million Wii software units, and another 30 million Nintendo DS systems and 180 million pieces of DS software.