Nintendo appeals to share holders

When pressed about the long-term prospects of Nintendo at a briefing with investors, Nintendo president Saturo Iwata has outlined how he believes the company will ride the turbulence created by falling sales of the WIi and DS.

Last month Nintendo reported a 42 per cent year-on-year drop in income for the three months ending June 30th, a figure blamed on tumbling sales of DS hardware and software.

But with the 3DS on the horizon, Iwata is sure of a change in fortune.

We understand that stock price is one of the major matters of concern to shareholders as well as a widely-recognized barometer of corporate value,” he stated.

Naturally, in our roles of top management, we are always aware of Nintendo’s stock price. On the other hand, it is also true that management cannot say what our current stock price should be because stock price is majorly impacted by investor valuation and the market environment.

We believe that Nintendo’s sound business development in the mid-and-long term will basically benefit all of the stakeholders. In other words, we need to regularly release products that can offer positive surprise to our customers and to try to make efforts to spread that meaningful surprise in order to maximize the number of our consumers who are willing to purchase our products.

We should be responsible for solid results in every fiscal year in order to not have people worry about our future by saying that Nintendo’s rapid growth through Nintendo DS and Wii was just very lucky and nothing but temporary. If we can have our shareholders acknowledge in mid to long run that pure luck alone could not have yielded the actual sales results of Nintendo DS and Wii and that Nintendo is the corporate organization which has the ability to sustain such performances, it will dispel the concerns about our future business and, as a result, lead to a high valuation by investors in the long run, I believe.

For the time being, we are concentrating on our new hardware, Nintendo 3DS, because it is very important to make Nintendo 3DS as popular as, or to make it more popular than, Nintendo DS which has been appreciated by so many people around the world. Of course, we are not focusing on just the new product that we have announced.

"For Nintendo DS and Wii which already have well-established installed bases, we are aware of the significance of developing quality software to continue to enhance their popularity.”