Thought this warranted it's own thread since there's a lot of confusion/misinformation about this, I see the "well at least Wii U is profitable" being thrown, but it sounds like it actually isn't, though I hope Iwata will clarify 100%

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-28/nintendo-s-outlook-disappoints-and-mario-can-t-save-wii-u

Wii U consoles will probably return to losing money and 3DS earnings will fall next fiscal year, Haruka Mori, a Tokyo-based analyst at JPMorgan & Chase Co., wrote in a Jan. 21 report.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/27/nintendo-earnings-what-to-watch-7/

Analysts also say that costs may rise from resuming Wii U production. The manufacturing cost for much of the Wii Us sold so far this business year was already booked, making this year’s sales of Wii U exceptionally profitable on its books.

Basically Nintendo didn't incur losses from the Wii U because they were selling unsold inventory from last fiscal year, meaning the manufacturing costs for the Wii Us they were selling were all on the previous fiscal year's books. 

Now that they've presumably sold through that inventory, they are going to have to go back to manufacturing new Wii U units ... which apparently still are hitting Nintendo at a loss. My guess is the highly customized nature of the hardware (ancient IBM PowerPC CPU that no one uses) is preventing Nintendo from being able to die-shrink the chipset and the controller can only be brought down in price so much. With such low sales, their supply vendors are probably also unwilling to give them a reduction on component prices. 

The other thing that strong hints at this is Nintendo's own forecast numbers. They expect their full year net profit to drop from where it was at the end of December to where it will be at the end of March 2015. This doesn't make any sense, unless there is some new element from after Dec 2014 that is causing them to lose money -- my guess is that's a clear indicator of Wii U hardware production starting up again and eating away some of their YTD net profit. 

Nintendo stated otherwise many months back that its not being sold for a loss if i recall.

Either way the inventory thing,that will be interesting, we shall see

you just cant trust jpm---

They actually did not. What Iwata was referring to was that Wii U inventory for last fiscal year would be at a profit, but that was because they were only selling previously manufactured units that they were stuck with (inventory glut). Lots of people mistakenly thought that was the same thing as the Wii U hardware being profitable as in, when Nintendo makes a single Wii U today, they profit off it when its shipped ... that doesn't seem to be the case. 

That was widely misinterpreted. It is as Soundwave reports: Nintendo took the loss on units produced but unsold for the 13-14 fiscal year, meaning that everything sold in 14-15 was, as far as the books were concerned, pure profit, although realistically if you took the manufacturing losses from 13-14 and the sale revenues from 14-15, you'd still come up short.

Since Nintendo's finally sold through their initial production line, they'll need to make more, and so incur costs again.

That would be, for certain reasons, hilarious, if it's true.

I suppose there's no way of being certain until they share the production cost. While the gamepad does add to the total a good deal I'd be surprised if the hardware costs are much more than what they sell it for.

Makes me wonder how much money Microsoft initially loses each time they sell an Xbox 1 at those crazy low prices, could be almost as bad as the original PS3 was

OP states it pretty well. Nintendo is in a tough spot to get suppliers to give them deals.

Is this another WiiU is dooomed thread by default?

Pretty certain it was no longer sold at a loss for a couple months now.....
http://mynintendonews.com/2014/05/08/nintendo-apparently-wont-be-making-a-loss-on-wii-u-anymore/

Apparently, that wasn't really the case.