I actually posted this earlier but I'll post it again: the $36 a share is the ADR price--American Depository Receipts--and 1 ADR = 1/8 of an actual share. A share in Japan IS around 30,000 yen. So, the market cap IS around $36 bln. PS. not all ADR's are 1/8--Nintendo's is 1/8 precisely because each share is expensive.

Actually the cash flow report does show net change in cash thru the March 2006. And it wasn't any different than 2005 numbers. It has gone from about 17 bucks to 37 bucks. It's not that much. That's just a little more than 100%. And that doesn't include anything like cash, revenues, liabilities, etc. That's just the stock price, which isn't necessarily a reflection of increasing revenues and other things. Doing the calculation for market capitilization at 36 dollars a share and 127.9 million outstanding shares you get around 4.5 billion dollars in market capitilization. I just don't see the value of the company on book being 30 billion dollars.

You guys have to stop arguing about the value of Nintendo ... All we really know is that they have ran very few unprofitable quarters since they became a videogame developer (the most recent one was a few years ago when the value of the yen shifted), they were rumored to be offered $25 Billion by Microsoft and turned it down, and Sega warned people not to underestimate Nintendo because they had a dedicated fanbase and a massive ammont of cash (it was rumored to be $8 Billion in liquid assets in 2000) ... Certainly, they're not as large as Sony or Microsoft, but they are still massive by most standards and have been more profitable than Sony in recent years ...

The expensive Nintendo stock is why Nintendo had that 'quiet period'. They wanted the government holding company to sell some of its stock back to the public, to make it available for ordinary Japanese people to cash in on Nintendo's success...

See above post: Nintendo shares are not trades on NYSE, it's ADR's that are traded. And 1 ADR = 1/8 actual nintendo share. Again, 4.5 * 8 = 36 bln. Does it make sense for a company with no debt and 7 bln in cash to only have a market cap of 4.5 bln?

Yep, I see that now. But from what I am looking at the value of calculated assets doesn't represent that. Even if you doubled it from around 7 or 8 billion which is what the stock has done in the last year. I guess I could see that though, companies like Google have a ridiculous market capitilization that doesn't really represent the value of the actual companies assets. Thanks for the info.

Also, the ADR doesn't track the TSE stock precisely because of currency fluctuations and differing time zones. The ADR trades during US Eastern time hours while the TSE trades during Japanese hours. Supposedly E-trade is going to let people trade on the TSE which will make it easier.

if the wii has failures as many as the ps2 and people end up buying multiple replacement ones, i wonder what the wii sales would look like.

Thankfully, that's highly unlikely. :)

It's close enough. ADR's should in theory does a perfect job tracking, since otherwise there would be arbitrage, but in practice this is not true. For instance, to my knowledge, some Indian ADR's have traded as much as 10% above the actual stock listing in India--because reasons such as restrictions on foreign ownership set by the Indian gov't. Also, the Nintendo ADR isn't particularly liquid. But all in all, it's "close enough", I'd estimate about 1-2% difference max on a consistent basis.