The Nintendo Switch launched in early March, and has since remained perennially sold out, also breaking all sales records along the way. This is because the Switch is selling at an astonishingly high rate, giving a lot of traders and investors the confidence that Nintendo has a hit on their hands. How big a hit? Apparently, one that could become a bigger hit than the Wii, which remains Nintendo’s highest selling console to this day.
Since the Switch’s launch on March 3, Nintendo has outperformed the broader Japanese stock market by 20 percentage points through Thursday. This is actually more than double the 8.9 percentage point outperformance that followed the Wii’s launch during an equal time period in 2006, and is also far ahead of the nearly 30 point lag shares suffered in 2012 after the Wii U’s launch. As far as the investors are concerned, then, it appears that the Switch is going to end up closer to the former than the latter.
It is being estimated that anywhere from 2.5 million to 3 million units were sold worldwide in March, which represents a highly successful launch- on the other hand, analysts are expecting that Nintendo’s famous, staunch conservatism may hurt the Switch’s sales potential, as well as their own on the stock market, a bit.
“Nintendo’s guidance of Switch volumes and OP (operating profit) numbers could very well underwhelm the market,” Jefferies Group analyst Atul Goyal wrote in a report to clients this week, indicating that while Switch sales won’t disappoint, Nintendo’s own forecasts might.
As of right now, the Switch appears to be a bona fide hit- it is now contingent on Nintendo to keep it that way.