No Price Drops Scheduled for DS or Wii & Finances Are Looking Rosy

According to Reuters, Nintendo has no plan to cut the prices of either Wii or DS this year.  Nintendo feels that they will continue to see growth in both of the product lines and at their current price / value they are still very competitive.

In an analyst meeting today (Friday, April 25) Nintendo president Satoru Iwata told financial insiders that, “Our earnings projection for the year is not based on hardware price cuts, and I don’t think we are going to need them.”

Nintendo “currently holds the leading position both in the console and the portable game markets.”  Here are some other interesting financial facts from the Reuters article:

• Nintendo’s operating profit more than doubled in the year ended March, and forecasts a further 9 percent gain this year to 530 billion yen ($5.08 billion).
• The company’s financial guidance actually falls short of market expectations with analysts believing that the company projections are on the “conservative side.”
• Nintendo is Japan’s third-largest company in market value, and actually revised up its earnings outlook three times in the year just ended.
• Sony Corp slashed the price of its PlayStation 3 with a 20-gigabyte hard drive by 20 percent to 49,980 yen ($479) before the product launch in late 2006, it then had to further lower the price an additional 44,980 yen last year to spur demand, while Nintendo has kept the Wii price unchanged since its launch at 25,000 yen.