Financial Sun Sinking on Nintendo?
Super Mario may be pretty tough when it comes to beating up assorted Koopa Troopa’s but it seems that he’s fairly redundant when it comes to defeating accountants. The banes of the boardroom have done what a thousand different tiny animals couldn’t, and brought Mario – or rather Nintendo as a company – to its knees. But despite severe losses, the executive management at the Kyoto-based corporation maintain that they will not be releasing their products on smartphones and tablets, effectively turning their backs of an estimated 1 billion extra devices and a huge slice of revenue.
Nintendo briefly lost a whopping fifth of their share value in an ongoing assault that threatens to seriously affect the company before rallying again and recouping some market confidence. Their projected 100 billion yen (£582 million) profit has been reduced to a 35 billion (£204 million) loss, which is pretty eye-watering for almost any company to weather, and is seen as a consequence of refusing to bow to market forces. As previously reported on UGP, the Wii U has struggled to attract new customers who are seen to want the functionality of a game device but with all the added extras that come as standard on even the cheapest tablets. That misunderstanding of consumer needs has punted the company products to something akin to over the neighbour’s fence and it’s going to take some nerve to retrieve them.
Nintendo has always prided itself on being an innovator rather than following the crowd in a “me too” kind of way, but unfortunately striking out on your own to try to create the next big thing – a situation that Nintendo ironically handled very well with the launch of the Wii – will only happen if your market research is spot on, and Nintendo currently seem to be way off what the market wants and are suffering for it.
Nintendo roughly translates from Japanese to English to mean “Leave Luck To Heaven”; with the way that their revenue is plummeting, maybe they should change the corporate name to “Jinsokuna nanika o suru” – that’s “Do Something Quick” to you and me.