Shuntaro Furukawa, the president of Nintendo, says that the company has no plans to raise the price of the Nintendo Switch.
In an interview with Nikkei, Furukawa told them about this. He said that there is more demand than supply for Switch right now, but that doesn’t mean that Nintendo will raise the price. The company doesn’t want to “price people out” and wants to “keep the momentum of our business as a whole.”
Furukawa said those things while talking about making Nintendo Switch hardware and setting sales goals.
Furukawa interview highlights
How is Nintendo doing when it comes to buying semiconductors?
With the help of our business partners, things should start to get better by the end of the summer. But we only have a clear production plan for this year. We expect to sell 21 million units in the fiscal year that ends in March 2023. After that, things are not clear.
I don’t know what exactly is in short supply. Nintendo will still sell three versions of the Switch: the standard model, the Switch Lite, which is smaller, cheaper, and has fewer features, and the OLED model. We’ll figure out what the best plan is as we go. With an eye on the next few years, we’re doing our best to get high-quality products at fair prices.
Are you losing chips and other parts to companies that make bigger, more expensive things, like cars?
We’re not having any trouble getting parts because we want to keep prices low. The problem is that people want more than they can get.
Are price hikes a possibility?
We don’t think about that right now for two reasons. We don’t want to price people out so that we can offer unique entertainment to a wide range of people. We compete with all the different kinds of fun in the world, and we always set our prices based on how much fun they give.
Software is also one of our products. So far, Nintendo has sold more than 100 million Switch consoles, and it’s important for our business to keep going strong. In general, a weak yen makes it less profitable to sell Switch games in Japan.
Can Nintendo handle the rising costs of materials and shipping?
Our OLED model will still make less money than our other models for the time being. Not only has the cost of shipping by air gone up, but also the cost of shipping by sea. We’re trying to figure out what to do.
Since so much of Nintendo’s business comes from outside of Japan, the weak yen could be seen as a good thing. However, our costs for advertising and staffing in other countries also go up. To make up for this, we’re buying more inventory in foreign currencies.
Can you meet your sales goal for Nintendo Switch this year?
It’s been out for six years now. I can only say that we’ll try to keep up the same rate of sales. Having successful software also helps the hardware. We have a bunch of new games coming out that will help us try to meet our sales projections. For example, Splatoon 3 comes out in September and Pokemon [Scarlet and Violet] comes out in November.
