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Soundwave on 23 September 2015
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bigtakilla said:
Soundwave said:


Not that I really care to argue this point but Gibbongame's "translations" are often times inaccurate also because he's often live blogging from Nintendo Q/A events and quickly typing things and doesn't have the best grasp of the language either. 

The tweet he made about the Wii U hardware being profitable really ended up being that Iwata was saying they would not take a loss on Wii U units that fiscal year ... because they had so much unsold inventory that they would not have to manufacture new units for that existing fiscal year for example (which means the losses for those manufactured units were already accounted into the previous fiscal year). People did not understand that and thought it meant "Wii U is now profitable to manufacture!", when that's not what he said at all. If you want actual translations its better to read the actual fiscal reports that Nintendo provides at the year/quarter ends which have professionally translated versions of the Q/A and investor briefings. 

Show their annual losses for last year then... Oh wait...


I'll show you the actual quote from Iwata:

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/library/events/140508qa/index.html

With respect to the impact of Wii U hardware sales on profit and loss, in order to sell 3.60 million units, we have to produce some more hardware units on top of our current hardware inventory. However, since the loss arising due to the hardware production costs being higher than our trade price was taken into account in the previous fiscal year, you could assume that there will be almost no loss this fiscal year for the sales of the 3.60 million hardware units.

 

What he's saying is the manfacturing cost for a lot of their Wii U inventory came from the previous fiscal year (read: we have a shit load of Wii Us sitting unsold so we don't have to manufacture many more), so the loss for those units was already factored in to the previous fiscal year. He even says "almost no loss", which means there IS a loss even when you take those previously manufactured units into account. 

Somehow this got simplified into "lulz, Wii U is sold at profit" ... like again, this is an example of very shoddy internet game reporting. 

The truth is I don't think Nintendo's part suppliers are willing to give them any breaks on the Wii U components and that's why Nintendo is having a hard time getting production cost down. They used a lot of propietary parts that no one else uses like the Renesas eDRAM, which ironically now I believe is made in only one factory which is owned by Sony. Resistive touch panel on the controller, IBM PowerPC CPU, these are components no one else uses anymore etc. etc. They are likely getting killed on these component costs. Since the system is not selling great, suppliers are not going to be enthusiastic about lowering their supply cost because there's no upside for them to doing that.