Thank you for attending our Corporate Management Policy Briefing despite your busy schedules. I am Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo.

In terms of our financial results, as Yoshihiro Mori has just explained to you, we were not able to achieve the results that we had originally forecast for this year-end sales season, and since Wii U most recently has not been able to keep its launch momentum, we decided that it was necessary to announce a downward revision to our financial forecast in our net sales and operating profit. I feel deeply responsible for having failed to achieve sufficient results in this most crucial period of the year, the year-end sales season.

The main goal of today’s session is to explain to you our prospects for recovery in the next fiscal year, but before that,

I would like to talk about how we performed last year in the global video game market.

I would like to begin by talking about the Japanese market.

This graph compares how various platforms boosted their total sales in the first two years from their respective launches. As shown here, the consumer sales of Nintendo 3DS reached 10 million units in less than two years. This sales pace is slightly slower than that of Nintendo DS which penetrated the market at an explosive rate, but it is the second fastest-selling system to date, far exceeding the sales paces of all hardware systems before Nintendo DS. While Nintendo 3DS did not get off the ground so well, we managed to place it back on an ideal sales track.

This chart shows the top 20 titles from last calendar year in the Japanese video game market. We have 14 titles for Nintendo platforms, nine of which are for Nintendo 3DS. In particular, "Animal Crossing: New Leaf," launched on November 8, had a big presence in the market and led last year’s year-end sales season.

This graph shows the sales transitions of various handheld systems in the Japanese market in the year-end sales seasons of last calendar year as well as the preceding year. The dark colors represent last year’s data while the light colors the preceding year’s.
Even a cursory glance reveals that Nintendo 3DS boasts an enormous presence in the entire market. Compared with the year 2011 when we had three million-selling titles, "SUPER MARIO 3D LAND," "Mario Kart 7" and "Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate" launched in quick succession, the sales peak from 2012 was certainly lower, partially due to the fact that we launched Wii U towards the end of the year 2012 and consumer interest was certainly dispersed across many products, but the launch of "Animal Crossing: New Leaf" in week 45 vitalized the market from an early stage, and the sales remained at a very high level throughout the year-end sales season. As for the Nintendo 3DS sales in the Japanese market, we achieved the higher results than we had expected before the sales season.

This graph shows the sales transitions of home consoles in the Japanese market.

The plots share the same scale as handheld hardware on purpose. The Japanese market has been revolving around handheld devices for quite some time, and as for our newly launched Wii U, its sales were relatively good in 2012, but they soon dropped considerably as the year-end sales season came to a close.

This shows the sales transitions of various hardware systems in the past three years in the Japanese market.

In the year 2011 we saw the total yearly sales of video game systems in the Japanese market come back to 10 million units, but in 2012, although Nintendo platforms boosted their sales by 15 percent, total sales again fell below 10 million units. One characteristic of the Japanese market is that handheld systems, in particular Nintendo 3DS, occupy a higher proportion of total sales.

This shows the sales transitions of software in the Japanese market in the last three years.

Change first becomes noticeable in the hardware market before the software market, and as such Nintendo 3DS does not have as high a presence as it does in the hardware market, but the software sales for Nintendo 3DS still grew considerably, by 2.3 times, on a year-over-year basis.

The software for Nintendo platforms increased their sales by 17 percent year-on-year, but the entire software market showed the slight decline.

Next let me talk about the U.S. market.