| Helloplite said: I thought you are supposed to provide meaningful analysis to back up your claims, no? I agree with you -- Nintendo has never been in real trouble -- but this is a completely needless topic to raise, almost feels like a flame war waiting to happen. Especially when you compared Nintendo to Sony. |
Trying to present Nintendo's liability as a negative is pretty weird. 1.6 billion $ in liabilities is really low compared to 13 billionish in assets. Furthermore, their liabilities did not double from 2016. And, 2016 just happened to be an exceptionally low year in terms of liabilities (down about 50 billion from the year before). Even if it was an increase from 2016, it's in line with their typical amount of liabilities, and in a year where they're launching a new console, that's not all that concerning.
The bottom line though is that their asset/liabilitiy ratio is about 15% which is incredibly healthy. If anything, you could argue they're playing it too safe and should be spending more aggressively for more growth. This ratio is lower than Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, and any other company I thought to look at.
You seem to be changing comparisons from absolute numbers when talking about assets, and then suddenly to YOY when talking about Nintendo's liabilities. In terms of absolute numbers, Sony's liabilities increased by almost a trillion yen, or 9.1 billion dollars as opposed to about 750 million dollars (82 billion yen) for Nintendo. Nintendo's 82 billion yen liabilitiy increase is offset by a 170 billion yen increase in assets. Sony's increase in assets and liabilities basically cancel eachother out.
Speaking of Sony, you completely ignored their liabilities. So, yes their assets are more than 10x Nintendo's, but that number doesn't mean much in a vacuum. Their liabilities are considerably higher, at a little over 80% of their current assets. Which is definitely on the high end. So while they have 160 billion dollars in assets, you have to factor in the 130 billion in liabilities. With that said, they have about 30 billion dollars in excess of their liabilities, compared to Nintendo which has around 10 billion.
By the way, a signficant portion of Sony's assets (about 10 billion dollars) are intangible. they have 5 billion dollars in good will for instance. In contrast, Nintendo only lists about 100 million in intangible assets, which seems to be vastly lowballing themselves. The value of their IPs, name recognition, and goodwill has to be more than that, so this brings the real values of the comapnies a bit closer.
Most of Sony's assets are long term assets (about 120 billion out of that 160 I think) whereas most of Nintendo's assets are short term. Nintendo is far more able to access cash short term, especially when you consider that Sony's short term liabilities eclipse their short term assets while Nintendo's short term liabilities are a blip on the radar.
Nintendo crushes Sony in terms of both liquidity and solvency. Over the past decade, I'm almost positive Nintendo has higher profits by a wide margin. Of the measures typically used to measure a company's health, the only place Sony might win is in operating income.
Simply put, Nintendo is way healthier than Sony. It's hard to imagine them even burning through their short term assets in less than 2 decades, even with a string of Wii U level failures. But a few years as bad as 2011/2012 could really have Sony struggling with their creditors.
