Nintendo announced on Tuesday that it will reveal the next version of its popular Switch gaming console sometime this year. This news came after the company said it expects its profit to decrease because it anticipates fewer people buying its current Switch.
According to a message from Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa, posted on a website and translated by Google, the new Switch will be announced by March 2025. However, there won’t be any details about it at the upcoming Nintendo Direct event in June.
This announcement follows Nintendo’s financial report for the last quarter and the whole fiscal year that ended in March 2024.
Earlier, Nintendo had predicted it would sell 15.5 million units of the Switch by the end of March. However, it ended up selling 15.7 million, surpassing its expectations. For the next fiscal year, which ends in March 2025, Nintendo expects to sell 13.5 million Switch consoles.
Investors have been waiting to hear from Nintendo about a successor to the Switch, which has been around for more than seven years. Analysts had predicted a new Switch, possibly called Switch 2, to be launched in 2024, but Nintendo hasn’t said much about it.
Nintendo has managed to keep the current Switch popular by releasing games like “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” and “Super Mario Bros. Wonder” last year, which boosted interest in the console and its games.
However, Nintendo’s game lineup for this year isn’t very full. With a new console on the way, Nintendo hopes to use its famous characters to increase interest and sales in its hardware business.
The age of the current Switch is starting to affect Nintendo’s predictions. For the fiscal year ending in March 2025, Nintendo expects sales of 1.35 trillion yen and a profit of 300 billion yen. This is lower than what analysts expected and represents a 39% decrease in profit compared to the previous year.
Here’s how Nintendo performed in its last quarter compared to what analysts predicted:
- Revenue: 277.1 billion Japanese yen ($1.8 billion) versus 280.6 billion yen expected.
- Net profit: 82.6 billion yen versus 57.2 billion yen expected.
In the last quarter, revenue dropped by nearly 10% compared to the previous year, while net profit decreased by 4.5%.
For the whole fiscal year ending in March 2024, Nintendo’s sales totaled 1.7 trillion yen, which was higher than analysts’ estimates and represented a 4.4% increase compared to the previous year. Net profit was 490.6 billion yen, also higher than market estimates, and increased by 13.4% compared to the previous year.
