Thank you for attending our Financial Results Briefing despite your busy schedules. I’m Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo.

First I would like to explain the environment surrounding the global video game market by talking about the Japanese, European and U.S. video game markets.

First, I would like to talk about the Japanese market.

This chart shows the top 20 titles from the beginning of this year through last week in the Japanese video game market.
We only had two titles for Nintendo 3DS in the top 20 chart last year, and I hope you can see that the situation has dramatically changed in a year. This year there are nine titles for Nintendo 3DS in the chart. There are also a total of 12 titles for Nintendo’s handheld systems, while there were only three last year. Also, the total number of titles in the top 20 for Nintendo’s platforms increased from eight to 15 in a year. In particular, the Nintendo 3DS market has been expanding steadily, and we are confident that Nintendo 3DS is indeed driving the video game market forward. The Nintendo 3DS software sales grew more than 3.5 times from the same period last year.

This chart, which is based on sales data provided by Media Create, shows the sales of different handheld game systems in the Japanese market. As you can also observe in the previous chart, Nintendo 3DS has been driving the market, and sales progressed favorably throughout the year.
We launched the Nintendo 3DS XL system at the end of July and sold more than 200,000 units in its first week, which corresponds to week 30 in the chart. This launch led to a bigger sales boost than when we marked down the Nintendo 3DS system in August last year. Although the lowest demand for video games is usually experienced in October, Nintendo 3DS is nevertheless maintaining high sales levels this October.

This graph shows the sales of home consoles in the Japanese market. This year’s Wii sales transition was very similar to that of the previous year, except when “Dragon Quest X” (Japanese title) was released in early August, whose launch led to a sharp increase in sales. However, partly because our new console, Wii U, is scheduled for launch towards the end of the year, the current Wii sales are on the decline.
As I showed you just now, we only had very few weeks in which the Nintendo 3DS sales fell below 50,000 units. On the contrary, the only week in which a home console exceeded 50,000 units in weekly sales was when “One Piece: Pirate Warriors” was released in March. In terms of this year’s hardware sales, the Nintendo 3DS system is indeed driving the market forward.

Next, let me talk about the European market.

This table, which lists the top 20 titles in Europe, has been created by Nintendo by adding software sales figures from January to September 2012 that were provided by market research companies in the following 14 European countries: the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Austria and Switzerland.
As each European country has its own market characteristics, I would like to use these data first to paint an overall picture of the European market.
This year we have three titles for Nintendo 3DS that were not included in the table for the same period last year. The new entries for the Pokémon series were launched in October this year, as opposed to March the previous year, and evergreen titles for Wii are losing their presence in the market. This ultimately led to an overall year-on-year reduction, from 10 to eight titles, for Nintendo platforms. Also, the three Nintendo 3DS titles are the only titles in the top 20 that are designed for a handheld system, and this shows that the weight that handheld systems have in this market is very different from the Japanese market. In the Japanese market, 13 titles in the top 20 are for handheld systems.
In Europe, Sony’s PS3 is taking a lead over Microsoft’s Xbox 360, with nine titles listed for its platform.

This graph shows the sales of home consoles in the European market. These are Nintendo’s estimates based on sales information provided by market research companies in each European country.
While every platform saw a slower pace of sales, Wii sales, which saw a big increase in May last year when we performed a price reduction, had a particularly large year-on-year drop.

This is a year-on-year comparison of weekly sales transitions of handheld game systems in the European market.
Nintendo 3DS had the biggest market share even before the launch of the Nintendo 3DS XL system, but it was far from satisfactory in terms of sales. However, after week 30, which corresponds to the launch of the Nintendo 3DS XL system, sales grew considerably, and the sales boost from this launch was greater than that of the markdown in the previous year’s summer. As a result, Nintendo 3DS led the European video game market in August.We succeeded in maintaining a good sales pace for Nintendo 3DS from September to the first half of October, which is usually the slowest sales season for handheld game systems. Therefore, we feel that we have laid a firm foundation upon which to accelerate sales further as we head into the year-end season.