Nintendo: 107 million Switches worldwide and annual results in neon green

The publication of Nintendo’s annual results, relating to the company’s fiscal year ended March 31, 2022, is an opportunity to take a new step forward on the sales figures for the Switch, the game console manufacturer’s hybrid. Since the last time of passage (December 31, 2021), 4.11 million new machines have found takers between January and March of the new calendar year. This brings the total volume sold in fiscal year 2022 to a very respectable 23.06 million units.

This is a figure down 20% from the 2021 record (28.8 million units), but it is still a very good performance considering the endless shortage of components electronics, which Nintendo suffers like all the other market players, but all the same to a lesser degree due to the relative simplicity of the chipsets equipping the Switch. In total, there are now 107.65 million copies of the machine which are in circulation in the world, not far from the almost final score of Sony’s PlayStation 4 (117 million units).

Game sales and financial results looking good

At the same time, and without much surprise for a console with such a large installed base, software sales are also in good shape. There are thus 235 million Switch games sold over the last 12 months, a figure in which the star titles published by Nintendo itself contribute greatly, including Metroid Dread, Pokemon Legends: Arceus or Kirby and the Forgotten World.

All this allows the company to record a turnover and an operating profit both slightly down, but still remarkably stable compared to the historical records of the previous year: respectively 1695.3 billion yen (12.3 billion euros, -3.6%) and 592.8 billion yen (4.3 billion euros, -7.5%).

Diminishing but still bright outlook for 2023

As for the outlook, Nintendo does not anticipate a return to higher volume for fiscal year 2023, confirming that the Switch has now entered its downward phase. Not enough to prepare the funeral oration for all that: the company is counting on 21 million consoles sold by the end of the next month of March (-8.7% compared to 2022, -27.5% compared to to the 2021 record). This would remain colossal for a machine now entering its sixth year of existence, and it is also more than the target of 20 million units predicted just a few days ago by analysts at Nikkei Asia. Suffice to say that down or not down, the near future still looks bright for Kyoto.