Nintendo Trims Red Ink, Lowers Forecast for Year

Nintendo Co. trimmed its red ink for the fiscal first half to a 28 billion yen ($350 million) loss, but the Japanese game maker lowered its sales and profit forecasts for the full year ahead of the launch of its new Wii U home console.

Nintendo, which did not break down quarterly results, had reported a 70 billion yen loss for the April-September period last year.

Nintendo, the maker of Super Mario and Pokemon games, has been hard hit by the popularity of smartphones and other nifty mobile devices that are luring people away from game machines such as Nintendo's Wii console and handhelds such as the Nintendo 3DS. Rivals Sony Corp. and Microsoft Corp. have struggled against the same trend.

Nintendo lowered its profit forecast for the full business year through March 2013 to 6 billion yen ($75 million) from 20 billion yen because of weakening demand in recent months and the strong yen. It cut its sales forecast to 810 billion yen ($10.1 billion) from 820 billion yen.

Nintendo is banking on the Wii U, the first major game console to arrive in stores in years, to boost its bottom line. It goes on sale Nov. 18 in the U.S., later that month in Europe and Dec. 8 in Japan.

It has a touch-screen tablet controller and TV-watching features but it's unclear whether it will prove a hit like the original Wii, which offered a new kind of entertainment when it arrived in 2006 with its wand-like controller that players could swing like a racket or a fishing pole.

Nintendo also said the lower forecast reflected an unfavorable exchange rate. The yen has been continually rising in recent years, and that erodes the value of overseas earnings for Japanese exporters like Nintendo.

Declining sales of the current Wii, in hardware and software games, also contributed to the lowered forecast, the Kyoto-based company said.