The Nintendo Switch 2, or whatever Nintendo is planning to name its next-generation (or updated) console, is unlikely to surface until April 2024 at the very earliest, according to Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa, who told investors in an earnings call today that no new or upgraded hardware is included in Nintendo’s annual forecast. Furukawa’s remarks seem to confirm that a successor to the Switch won’t be revealed for at least another year, and while it’s unclear whether Nintendo plans to share details for new hardware during that 12-month time frame, financial results that were released today would suggest that the company may want to speed things up, with Nintendo Switch sales and profits expected to decline for the fiscal year ending March 2024. Nintendo’s latest Switch model, the Nintendo Switch – OLED Model – The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Edition, is now available for $359.99.
From a Bloomberg report (alternate link):
“Sustaining the Switch’s sales momentum will be difficult in its seventh year,” President Shuntaro Furukawa said on a call after the results. “Our goal of selling 15 million unit this fiscal year is a bit of stretch. But we will do our best to bolster demand going into the holiday season so that we can achieve the goal.”
Furukawa added that no new or upgraded hardware is factored into Nintendo’s annual forecast. He previously described the 2022 holiday season as disappointing, telling analysts that sales were affected by the sluggish global post-Covid reopening and the economic malaise brought about by inflationary pressure.
“We expect Nintendo will not release the next-generation hardware over the next 12 months,” UBS Securities analyst Kenji Fukuyama said in a letter to clients ahead of the earnings report. “Nintendo’s valuation is very likely to shrink until the launch of the new hardware.”
From a Nintendo earnings release:
As for hardware, units sold declined 22.1% year-on-year to 17.97 million units, as shortages of semiconductors and other components impacted production until around the end of summer, and we did not experience the growth in sales mainly during the holiday season that we saw in the previous fiscal year. The sales situation for software remained stable, but unit sales declined 9.0% year-on-year to 213.96 million units, affected to some extent by the decline in hardware sales.
For the fiscal year ending March 2024, we forecast a decrease in net sales and profits due to a reduction in the unit sales of Nintendo Switch hardware and software, as well as the assumed exchange rate having an appreciated yen compared to the fiscal year ending March 2023. Nintendo Switch has entered its seventh year since launch, and while it will become more challenging to maintain the same sales momentum as before, our goal is to have more consumers continue to play Nintendo Switch for longer, leading to maximized sales. We aim to achieve this by maintaining high user engagement and conveying the appeal of not only new software titles but also titles released in previous years.