Assets are not cash reserves.

Industrial and manufacturing companies tend to have a high asset values. This does not make them valuable companies. Assets usually carry liabilities. For example, you can own a multi-billion dollar factory. But that factory will have employees you have to pay, insurance, maintenance, and debt. Assets may depreciate over time as well, especially with high-tech assets.

Another way of looking at assets it is like this.

Person A owns a McMansion. It's worth $2million. It might sell on the open market for $1.5 million.

Person B owns a small house. It's worth $250,000. It might sell on the open market for $225,000.

Who is richer?

.....

...

Person A owes $1.9 million dollars on the house. In addition, the McMansion requires several thousand dollars of insurance and maintenance each month. Person A is currently unemployed and has $100,000 in savings.

Person B owns their house outright, no debt. The upkeep is minimal, just a couple hundred a month. Person B makes $200,000 a year and has savings of $1 million.

This is why asset totals are meaningless without context.

this... it even comes with a link... lol now the thread kinda ended?? :p

And just for the record here's some links:

http://kontrib.com/get_translation.php?story_id=8231&lang_id=1&frame=main

http://www.dailytech.com/Article.aspx?newsid=9040&commentid=189134

http://www.dailytech.com/Nintendo+Now+the+Fifth+Largest+Company+in+Japan/article8209.htm

http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7008956408

http://online.barrons.com/article/SB124001833826031167.html

http://business.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/eng/20071217/143199/?ST=print_e

This is how the business world views Nintendo.  My apologies for offending the video game community.

That list is from 2006.

Ever is impossible to say, they are all extrememly safe in the medium term although Japan does have some strange business practices.

They are too big and too important to just cease trading, they would be taken over long before anything like that happend.

So by your calculation I am personally a bigger company than Sony because I made a profit last year by working? 

If you made billions more in profits over years and had the potential to continue that trend, I'd say your business was more valuable.

I'm not asking you-who-contains-logic...And it's not MY business, it's ME, an Employee that was paid money to work, and kept some of it at the end of the year. Thus generating a profit. Something Sony did not do last year.... (reference pipedream's post for further understanding)

sony has $230 billion in assets
microsoft has $77 billion in assets
Nintendo has 1.8 trillion yen in assets thats roughly 19 billion dollars in

source:wikipedia

sony is huge

GM had over $300 billion in assets at the time of its demise, for all the good it did it.

BTW, I'm not saying Sony is GM. Just pointing out how useless stating assets are without context.