Nintendo has said it may raise hardware prices if rising memory and component costs cannot be absorbed over the medium to long term. President Shuntaro Furukawa made the comments in a question-and-answer session at the briefing on second-quarter earnings for the fiscal year ending March 2027.
Furukawa said manufacturing costs are trending higher because of a range of external factors. The company's basic policy is to respond first through its own efforts, such as making production more efficient, and to carry the portion it cannot absorb itself, he said, so that it can keep selling prices as they are for as long as possible.
He then set out the limit. If, looking at profitability across the business, the impact runs over the medium to long term and cannot be absorbed by the company's efforts alone, and if it becomes hard to maintain a sound earnings structure, a price revision would need to be considered, he said.
Software priced case by case
Physical software is also exposed, because game cards use memory, though Furukawa said the effect there is more limited than on hardware. The basic policy for software is to set a price that matches the value of each title, he said, rather than applying a single price across the board.
Prices will be considered and decided individually, based on the content of each game, he said.
Inventories swell to ¥814.5 billion
Inventories rose from ¥539.8 billion at the end of the previous fiscal year to ¥814.5 billion at the end of September. Furukawa attributed the increase mainly to stockpiling for the year-end shopping season, higher prices for memory and other raw materials, and planned procurement to keep production stable.
The higher unit price of Switch 2 hardware compared with earlier Nintendo consoles is also pushing up the total value of inventory, he said.
The cost pressure is expected to grow. Furukawa said the effect of higher procurement prices is gradually showing up compared with when the Switch 2 launched, and that from the third quarter the share of materials bought at the elevated prices will be larger than in the first half.
Sales steady after Japanese price change
Nintendo put through a price revision in Japan in May and in other regions in September. The Switch 2 passed 25 million units about a year and a half after launch, which Furukawa called a smooth run.
In Japan, sell-through settled after the revision. Furukawa said the console has spread faster than any previous Nintendo game system and that buyers rushed in before the change. Outside Japan, Nintendo bundled hardware with software in the period between announcing and applying the revision, and Furukawa said sales around the change have so far not diverged as much as in Japan.
With the hardware price revision already made, Furukawa said sales over the next few weeks will be very important to hitting the sales plan.