Nintendo will soon be worth one trillion dollars yen, thanks to the money-printing Nintendo DS.
Nintendo of Japan released its financial statement for the six-month period that makes of the first half of the company's fiscal year. As if you needed this news report to tell you, Nintendo is selling a lot of hardware and making a lot of money.
In the past half-year, over 10 million Nintendo DS systems have found their way into the hands of consumers. All but 2 million of those are of the DS Lite variety. Breaking it down by region, 4.6 million units were sold in Japan, 2.4 million were sold in the Americas, and around 3.1 million were distributed to "other" territories. Thus far, Nintendo has sold more than 26.8 million DS handhelds worldwide.
All of those sales are generating big bucks. In the past six months, Nintendo is reporting gross worldwide sales of 298.8 billion yen ($2.52 billion) up 69.4% from the same period last year. From that, Nintendo took 54.3 billion yen ($458.7 million) in profit, and added it to their assets coffer, which now stands at a mind-boggling 989.3 billion yen ($8.36 billion).
Looking ahead, Nintendo is about halfway to its stated goal of having 20 million DS systems distributed this year (which for Nintendo, ends in March). They are also still confident of meeting their Wii shipment targets of 6 million hardware units and 17 million software units (which does not include the WiiSports pack-in) by the end of the four month launch window.
For reference, Nintendo also included hardware figures for the GBA and GameCube. Life-to-date, nearly 76.8 million Game Boy Advance handhelds have shipped across the world, compared to only 21.2 million GameCubes.