Today we woke up, as we expected, to Nintendo's financial reports for this second quarter of the current fiscal year 2023-2024 (the one belonging to the summer season), from which some rather impressive sales figures and a general rise in profits are drawn, but with one important note absent: there is no mention in the forecasts about new hardware.
But let's go point by point. Undoubtedly the highlight is the sales balance as of September 30 for the Nintendo Switch family of consoles. 132.46 million Switch have been sold worldwide, meaning that Nintendo Switch remains the third best-selling console in history, still behind the Nintendo DS (154 million) and PlayStation 2 (155 million). Nintendo also forecasts sales until the end of the fiscal year of 15 million units more, which invites us to think that it will probably not surpass the previous two in the next balance either, unless the last hypothesis of this article is fulfilled.
However, the big absentee in the entire report has been the Nintendo Switch successor. In the shared documents there is not a single mention of future hardware, neither Super Nintendo Switch nor Switch 2, nor anything like that.
Still, it's a slightly upwardly revised forecast, and Nintendo also reports that it has increased its overall net sales forecast by as much as 9% over March 2023. Part of this optimism comes from a 20% rise in net sales, despite the falling yen and volatile markets. But the other plausible option for revenue and profit growth is that they are preparing to make a software announcement or a major price cut on Switch and Lite consoles earlier in the first calendar quarter, once Christmas stock is cleared.