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| Nintendo Switch sales are still high |
Nintendo Switch sales continued to grow, with the company selling 6.86 million platforms between July and September.
This figure corresponds to an increase of 43% compared to the 4.8 million platforms in the same period last year.
Since its launch in 2017, the platform has achieved a total sales volume of 68.3 million units.
Given the strong performance in the second quarter of last year, the growth was impressive. A cheaper version of the Switch Lite was released that increased Nintendo's shipments by more than 50%.
Switch is more popular than Switch Lite as Nintendo sold 5.31 million Switch platforms to 1.55 million Switch Lite platforms in three months.
Switch sales also improved from the previous quarter, when Nintendo sold 5.68 million platforms.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons, released earlier this year, was the main driver of sales, selling an additional 3.64 million copies during the quarter.
That number has dropped dramatically by 10.63 million copies in the past three months.
This game has total sales of 26.04 million copies, making it the second best-selling Switch game after Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
The company's games in the last quarter are extremely rare: at the end of September, 5.21 million Super Mario 3D All-Star games and 2.82 million Paper Mario: King of Origami games were sold.
Nintendo has raised its forecast significantly for this fiscal year due to its strong sales performance and is now forecasting an operating profit of 450 billion yen by the end of March 2021.
This is a 50% increase from my forecast of 300 billion yen in May.
The company reported operating income of 291.4 billion yen ($ 2.79 billion) for the first six months of this year.
Nintendo now plans to sell 24 million Exchange platforms, or more than 19 million, this fiscal year.
Nintendo hopes to shift its sales momentum to the biggest Christmas quarter as it faces stiff competition with the launch of PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S next week.
Some reports claim Nintendo is planning to launch a new Switch platform in early 2021.