DS sales top 144 million, Wii nears 85 million

Today Nintendo reported its earnings for the nine months ending December 31, 2010. And once again for the formerly cash-flush game giant, the news was not good. The Kyoto-based company reported nine-month net revenue of ¥807.99 billion ($9.76 billion), down 31.7 percent from ¥1.182 trillion ($14.28 billion) during the same period the year prior. Net income--aka profit--plummeted 74.3 percent from ¥192.60 billion ($2.33 billion) to ¥49.56 billion ($598.8 million).

One reason for the falling sales numbers was ¥84.40 billion ($1.02 billion) of foreign currency exchange losses due to the strong yen. Another reason was slowing sales of Nintendo's various platforms. The company lowered its full-year sales forecasts for its systems, dropping DS hardware from 23.5 million to 22.5 million units and Wii hardware from 17.5 million to 16 million units. Curiously, though, the company's Wii software forecast increased from 138 million to 170 million units and its DS software estimates went from 125 million to 135 million units for the 12 months ending March 31, 2011.

Despite the lowered forecast, Nintendo's platforms remain far ahead of the competition in terms of sales. As of December 31, the DS had sold 144.59 million hardware systems and 817.49 million software units. Lifetime shipments of the Wii totaled 84.64 million units, with a software total of 695.37 million units sold. During the October-December period--which Nintendo did not offer separate financial information for--combined global shipments of the DS suite of systems and Wii hardware totaled more than 17.75 million units, along with nearly 130 million games for the two platforms.