This slide shows the already announced Wii U titles that have either been released in each region in October 2015 or are awaiting release.
In addition to Nintendo-published titles, the lineup of software from other software publishers is becoming richer, so we would like to keep the momentum gained by Splatoon and Super Mario Maker.
Next is amiibo. amiibo was launched last year simultaneously with the Wii U version of Smash Bros. as a new product category. As of the end of the first half of this fiscal year, amiibo has shipped a total of approximately 21.10 million units globally since its launch.
As of the end of the previous fiscal year, approximately 10.50 million units of amiibo were shipped. In comparison with the end of the previous fiscal year, shipments almost doubled with incremental sales of approximately 10.60 million units in the first half of this fiscal year.
The shipments for this second quarter (approx. 6.40 million units) reached an all-time high for a single quarter. The Smash Bros. series amiibo and 30th anniversary Mario amiibo performed especially well in the US.
Sales managed to grow significantly despite it not being the year-end sales season, and the trend for this product being steadliy purchased regardless of seasonality is continuing.
In addition to the figure-type amiibo, we released Yarn Yoshi amiibo and card-type amiibo. Yarn Yoshi was released in Japan, Europe and Australia during this second quarter period and shipped approximately 400,000 units. It was also launched in the US in October and is enjoying a good start.
In addition, card-type amiibo, which was launched during this second quarter period, shipped approx. 8.60 million individual cards. As for the Japanese market, the first series of Animal Crossing amiibo cards, which were launched on July 30, surpassed the company’s expectations and production fell behind. Therefore, we delayed the launch of the second series of Animal Crossing amiibo cards in order to prioritize additional production of the first series. The second series will be launched today in Japan. I would like to apologize to our consumers and distributors who have been waiting for them.
This is a graph that shows the latest ratio of shipments by region for figure-type amiibo. The blue colored area represents the Americas. In the US, the so-called “Toys to Life” category, in which games work together with figures, are well recognized and people are familiar with this way of having fun. This is why during the previous fiscal year the percentage of shipments for the Americas was 66 percent, which represented a significant portion of total amiibo shipments. The Americas market still holds more than half of the total sales but you can tell from the graph that regions other than the US, where “Toys to Life” products had a late release, are gradually expanding. For your information, the majority of sales for “Other Regions” are from Australia. In addition to Australia, we started to ship to Asia from this financial period.
This slide shows individual amiibo characters sorted by cumulative unit sales from the end of last year’s launch to the end of this September for the Japanese, US and European markets.
Depending on the region, there are characters that are out of stock and some regions have different release dates for the same character, so this does not simply represent the demand or popularity. With that being said, you can see that Mario and Splatoon have a strong presence in Japan, whereas in the US, the Zelda series is strong, and character sales trends slightly differ between regions.
amiibo that were launched during this period are highlighted here.
You can see that newly released amiibo, such as Yarn Yoshi and Animal Crossing amiibo cards, are selling well.
In Japan, newly released amiibo have good momentum as amiibo compatible software and product recognition has increased. In the US, amiibo that were released in the past still continue to sell and one characteristic is that the ranking does not shift so much.
We will be introducing new amiibo to the lineup in the future.
Though we are preparing many, not all amiibo that will be released until March 2016 are shown here. To introduce a few, the first series of Animal Crossing amiibo figures will be launched in Japan, the US and Europe from the middle to the end of November. The second series will be launched in Japan on December 17.
In addition, Mega Yarn Yoshi will be launched in the US and Europe in November and in Japan on December 10.
Next is our digital sales situation.
This graph shows download sales from the latest three accounting periods up to the second quarter of this accounting period.
In this fiscal year, second quarter sales were less than the first-quarter sales, but the first half totaled 21.0 billion yen, which is double the figure of the previous first half and is the all-time high for first-half download sales historically.
The increase chiefly arises from the sales of add-on content.