Nintendo sells 2.74 million Switch consoles, trims quarterly losses

Nintendo Co.'s Switch, a new hybrid game machine that works as both a console and a tablet, is selling well, helping the Kyoto-based company behind the Super Mario and Pokemon franchises trim its quarterly losses.

Nintendo said Thursday it has sold 2.74 million Switch machines and 5.46 million units of Switch software since sales began in March. It had expected to sell two million Switch machines by the end of March.

The company anticipates selling another 10 million Switch machines in the fiscal year that ends in March 2018.

The company's January-March loss was 394 million yen ($4.8 million Cdn), improved from a 24 billion yen loss a year earlier. Quarterly sales jumped to nearly 178 billion yen ($2.2 billion) from 79 billion yen.

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Nintendo has lagged amid competition from smartphones, and also at times has been slammed by an unfavourable exchange rate. A strong yen cheapens the value of overseas earnings of Japanese exporters like Nintendo.

In the fiscal year that ended in March, Nintendo's profit jumped more than six times from the previous fiscal year to 102.6 billion yen ($1.26 billion), up from 16.5 billion yen.

But that result included extraordinary income from the sale of part of Nintendo's stake in the Seattle Mariners.

Nintendo, which also makes the 3DS portable console, is projecting its profit for the fiscal year through March 2018 at 45 billion yen ($550 million).

Legend of Zelda impresses

Nintendo said the Switch was off to a "promising start," with consumer demand strong for its The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and 1-2-Switch games.

Breath of the Wild sold more copies on the Switch than the Switch itself, moving 2.76 million units. It also sold 1.08 million copies on the older Wii U system. 

Nintendo didn't disclose figures for the minigame collection 1-2-Switch, instead noting that it "has been generating buzz."

Many new machines do well initially as hardcore fans tend to buy them. Then sales taper off. So the test for Nintendo is how long the momentum will persist.

It is promising Switch games that include Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, which goes on sale Friday, ARMS in June and Splatoon 2 in July.

"We aim to stimulate the platform and expand sales going into the holiday season this year," it said.

Big bucks on mobile

Nintendo has also begun to offer games for smartphones, reversing its earlier policy of shunning them.  

​The Wall Street Journal's Takashi Mochizuki reported that Super Mario Run and Fire Emblem Heroes earned the company over 20 billion yen ($245 million).​

Nintendo did not meet its target of 10 per cent of the people who downloaded the free trial of Super Mario Run. The game's first three levels are free to play with the option to unlock the rest of the game for $13.99 ($9.99 US).

But while Fire Emblem Heroes was downloaded by less than a tenth of the people who tried out Super Mario Run, it made more money, with its more traditional free-to-play system buoyed by in-game micro-transactions.