TOKYO (AP) – Nintendo Co. reported a 36 percent drop in quarterly profit on Tuesday after lackluster video game sales for the year-end holiday shopping season.
The Japanese manufacturer of Super Mario games and the Wii U game machine earned 29.1 billion yen ($241 million) profit for the October-December fiscal third quarter, down from 45.2 billion yen a year earlier.
The Kyoto-based company, which suffered a blow when its charismatic president Satoru Iwata died in July last year, kept its annual forecasts unchanged at a 35 billion yen ($290 million) profit on 570 billion yen ($4.7 billion) sales for the fiscal year through March.
Quarterly sales slipped 18 percent to 221.5 billion yen ($1.8 billion).
For the nine months from April through December, Nintendo said global sales of the Wii U reached 3.06 million units. It’s aiming to sell 3.4 million of the machines through March.