"The Switch is probably make-or-break for Nintendo."
Nonsense. Nintendo can sell 0 units of the Switch for 5 years and still have enough money to release a next generation console. They have almost 10 billion of cash. Another way of looking at this console is Nintendo can lose $3-4 billion dollars over the next 5 years (aka pull the original Xbox or Xbox 360) and still survive. We know for a fact that this console will not sell 0 units. So please stop with the doom and gloom rhetoric and sensationalist exaggerations that the Switch is a "make or break" console for Nintendo. That's something one would say if they don't know anything about finance.
| Soundwave said: It has to sell at least 40 million. Less than that would be crushingly embarrassing to Nintendo's hardware division, that would be a monstrous decline even from the 3DS + Wii U era which already wasn't a great generation. |
No offense but the only thing embrassasing are random console gamers on VGChartz and Neo-GAF trying to predict the demise of Nintendo (or AMD, etc.) without having opened a single accounting or finance book in their life.
Nintendo has 1.02 Trillion of Current Assets after already spending the R&D money developing the Switch. Converted to USD, Nintendo's current assets are ~ $9.8 billion USD.
http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/ntdoy/financials/balance-sheet
Nintendo can easily pay off ALL of its Total Liabilities with less than 1/4 of its Cash balance. That means theoretically Nintendo doesn't need to sell even a single Switch console to survive for the next console generation.
