Nintendo reports lower profits as demand drops for its aging Switch console

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Nintendo reports lower profits as demand drops for its aging Switch console

2024-11-05 17:33 Last Updated At：17:40

TOKYO (AP) — Nintendo, the Japanese video game maker behind the Super Mario franchise, said Tuesday that its profit fell 60% in the first half of the fiscal year, as demand waned for its Switch console, now in its eighth year since going on sale.

Kyoto-based Nintendo Co. reported a 108.7 billion yen ($715 million) profit for the April-September period, as sales slipped 34% from the previous year to 523 billion yen ($3.4 billion).

More than 74% of its sales revenue came from overseas, according to Nintendo, which didn’t break down quarterly numbers.

Global Switch sales during the period dropped to 4.7 million machines from 6.8 million units the previous year.

But Nintendo said in a statement that Switch sales were still growing and vowed to stick to its goal of selling a Switch console to each and every individual, not just one Switch per every household.

Nintendo stuck to its earlier projection for a 300 billion yen ($2 billion) profit for the full fiscal year through March 2025, down nearly 29% from the previous fiscal year.

Annual sales were forecast to drop 23% to1.28 trillion yen ($8.4 billion).

It also lowered its Switch sales projection for the fiscal year to 12.5 million units from an earlier forecast to sell 13.5 million.

Nintendo and other game and toy makers rake in their biggest profits during the Christmas shopping season, as well as New Year’s, a holiday celebrated with fanfare in Japan, when children receive cash gifts from grandparents and other relatives.

Nintendo has not yet announced details on a successor to the Switch.

Among its million-seller game software titles for the fiscal half were “Paper Mario RPG,” which sold 1.95 million units since going on sale in May, and “Luigi Mansion 2 HD,” hitting nearly 1.6 million in sales.

Overall, more than 70 million Switch games were sold during the period, for a total of nine titles that became million-sellers, including products from third-party manufacturers, or makers that aren’t Nintendo.

Still, that was down from more than 97 million games sold the previous year.

The release of a Super Mario Brothers movie lifted sales in the previous fiscal year, while the absence of such a movie this fiscal year negatively impacted the latest results, Nintendo said. Revenue also declined in its mobile-game offerings and IP-related businesses, it said.

Yuri Kageyama is on X: https://x.com/yurikageyama

What to know about the unprecedented floods that killed more than 200 in Spain

2024-11-05 17:37 Last Updated At：17:40

VALENCIA, Spain (AP) — In a matter of minutes, flash floods caused by heavy downpours in eastern Spain swept away almost everything in their path. With no time to react, people were trapped in vehicles, homes and businesses. Many died and thousands of livelihoods were shattered.

A week later, authorities have recovered 217 bodies — with 213 of them in the eastern Valencia region. Police, firefighters and soldiers continued to search Tuesday for an unknown number of missing people.

In many of the 69 devastated localities, mostly located in the southern outskirts of Valencia city, people still face shortages of basic goods. Water is back to running through pipes but authorities say it is only for cleaning and not fit for drinking. Lines form at impromptu emergency kitchens and food relief stands in streets still covered with mud and debris.

Thousands of volunteers are helping soldiers and police reinforcements with the gargantuan task of cleaning up the mire and the countless wrecked cars. The ground floors of thousands of homes have been ruined. Inside some of the vehicles that the water washed away or trapped in underground garages, there were still bodies waiting to be identified.

But the frustration over the crisis management boiled over on Sunday when a crowd in hard-hit Paiporta hurled mud and other objects at Spain’s royals, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and regional officials when they made their first visit to the epicenter of the flood damage.

Here are a few things to know about Spain’s deadliest storm in living memory:

The storms concentrated over the Magro and Turia river basins and, in the Poyo riverbed, produced walls of water that overflowed riverbanks, catching people unaware as they went on with their daily lives on Tuesday evening and early Wednesday.

In the blink of an eye, the muddy water covered roads and railways, and entered houses and businesses in towns and villages on the southern outskirts of Valencia city. Drivers had to take shelter on car roofs, while residents took refuge on higher ground.

Spain’s national weather service said that in the hard-hit locality of Chiva, it rained more in eight hours than it had in the preceding 20 months, calling the deluge “extraordinary.” Other areas on the southern outskirts of Valencia city didn't get rain before they were wiped out by the wall of water that overflowed the drainage canals.

When authorities sent alerts to mobile phones warning of the seriousness of the flooding and asking people to stay at home, many were already on the road, working or covered in water in low-lying areas or underground garages, which became death traps.

Scientists trying to explain what happened see two likely connections to human-caused climate change. One is that warmer air holds and then dumps more rain. The other is possible changes in the jet stream — the river of air above land that moves weather systems across the globe — that spawn extreme weather.

Climate scientists and meteorologists said the immediate cause of the flooding is called a cut-off lower-pressure storm system that migrated from an unusually wavy and stalled jet stream. That system simply parked over the region and poured rain. This happens often enough that in Spain they call them DANAs, the Spanish acronym for the system, meteorologists said.

And then there is the unusually high temperature of the Mediterranean Sea. It had its warmest surface temperature on record in mid-August, at 28.47 degrees Celsius (83.25 degrees Fahrenheit), said Carola Koenig of the Centre for Flood Risk and Resilience at Brunel University of London.

The extreme weather event came after Spain battled with prolonged droughts in 2022 and 2023. Experts say that drought and flood cycles are increasing with climate change.

Spain’s Mediterranean coast is used to autumn storms that can cause flooding, but this episode was the most powerful flash flood event in recent memory.

Older people in Paiporta, at the epicenter of the tragedy, say Tuesday’s floods were three times as bad as those in 1957, which caused at least 81 deaths. That episode led to the diversion of the Turia watercourse, which meant that a large part of the town was spared of these floods.

Valencia suffered two other major DANAs in the 1980s, one in 1982 with around 30 deaths, and another one five years later that broke rainfall records.

The flash floods also surpassed the flood that swept away a campsite along the Gallego river in Biescas, in the northeast, killing 87 people, in August 1996.

Management of the crisis, classified as level two on a scale of three by the Valencian government, is in the hands of the regional authorities, who can ask the central government for help in mobilizing resources.

Some 7,500 soldiers, trucks, heavy road equipment and Chinook helicopters have been deployed in addition to nearly 10,000 extra police officers from the National Police and Civil Guard to help with the search for bodies and the distribution of relief aid.

When many of those affected said they felt abandoned by the authorities, a wave of volunteers arrived to help. Carrying brooms, shovels, water and basic foods, hundreds of people walked several kilometers to deliver supplies and help clean up the worst-affected areas.

Sánchez’s government will approve a disaster declaration on Tuesday that will allow quick access to financial aid. Mazón has announced additional economic assistance.

The Valencia regional government has been heavily criticized for not sending out flood warnings to cellphones until 8 p.m. on Tuesday, when the flooding had already started in some places and well after the national weather agency issued a red alert indicating heavy rains.