Nintendo points to the upcoming launch of a new console

During the last Spanish dawn from Thursday to Friday, took place in Japan the last annual meeting of shareholders of Nintendo. A meeting of shareholders and directors that is repeated every summer and that, on many occasions, gives us a glimpse of some of the company’s closest movements, hidden between the many pages and documents made available to the public.

So, on this occasion, investors have not hesitated to ask why this past month, June 2022, Nintendo’s spending on supplies and raw materials has skyrocketed to 66.5 billion yen (approximately more than 470 million euros), standing out notably with the figure of previous years, reaching five times the expenses of the last two years (9,553 million yen in 2021 and 12,448 million yen in 2020).

And it is that going back just one more year, with the accounts presented in June 2019, just a few months before the arrival of the Nintendo Switch Lite and the revision of the standard model with the Mariko chip, showed another unusual peak in this category, tripling the previous year’s spending to 32,432 million yen.

For his part, Shuntaro Furukawa, president of Nintendo, vaguely excused this expense, assuring that «in the situation of shortage of supply and demand for components related to semiconductors, it is necessary to prepare for production, ensuring inventories of raw materials and components earlier than on previous occasions. The first reason is that we have more stock than before. The second reason is that there was a change in the accounting treatment with the adoption of the new revenue recognition standard.«.

Even so, this fact that has not taken long to set off all the alarms of the participants in the video game market, pointing to the possible arrival of a new Nintendo console in the not too distant future. And it is no secret that, in addition to the latest presentation of the Nintendo Switch OLED, the Japanese company is preparing a new console adapted to the standards of the new generation of consoles.

Apparently maintaining the hybrid format for portable and desktop gaming, repeating with a handheld “handheld” design, obviously this new console will not have the potential to compete directly with the PS5 and Xbox Series, although it could certainly recover part of the ground that other devices such as the Steam Deck are now gaining.