Iwata: A fourth year of losses would be ‘unacceptable’

Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata has vowed to prevent Nintendo suffering another year of losses.

Having reported its first ever loss in 2010, the company yesterday reported its third successive annual loss on the back of weak Wii U sales and lower than expected 3DS sales.

Two and three fiscal years ago, the extremely strong yen and transition between our video game platforms mainly put our revenue and expenses off balance,” Iwata told investors. Posting an operating loss for the fourth fiscal year running is something unacceptable. We see this fiscal year as a time to prioritize restoration of the balance of revenue and expenses.

For the last fiscal year, under the improved foreign currency exchange situation, we made various efforts to retrieve ‘Nintendo-like’ profits. We, however, could not achieve these results as the sales of our main hardware and software products ended up being well below our forecasts, and we incurred temporary one-off expenses from the purchase of technology that we did not expect at the beginning of the fiscal year.

I feel deeply responsible for this and I need to fulfill my responsibility by recovering the momentum of our business. We would like to retrieve ‘Nintendo-like’ profits as soon as possible. However, the success of a video game platform business depends greatly on its momentum, and it inevitably takes time to rebuild the business once the platform has lost its momentum.”

In December last year analyst Michael Pachter said he doesn’t know why Iwata is still employed”.