I doubt it. He was refering to the 3DS when he made that statement. It's initial poor sales due to not correctly conveying to the public what the console was about. . Considering this article is from 2012 he did nothing to "correctly convey what the console about" with the wii u.

Iwata has the mentality of a politician. He keeps claiming to have learned from past mistakes but constantly repeats them.

I wonder why the losses of the 2 previous years were higher...

Iwata recently said that he misread the market and the interview from late 2012/early 2013 proves it.

The most interesting part of all this is the interviewer´s question n. 9:

You have committed to the operating profit of 100 billion yen; however, the hardware market has shrunk drastically this fiscal year. What are the assumed conditions of the market to achieve 100 billion yen? I would like to know if the assumed market size is similar to the current fiscal year, larger to some degree or shrink continuously.

I really wants to know who is this guy. It seems that there´s still someone with senses on the videogame journalism, even if it´s just one guy. Anyone that believes the console market will get bigger next year may be just delusional. If that was Iwata´s thought, then he fell on the trap of the videogame journalists

It was clear based on the game release schedule that the 3DS was Nintendo's focus in 2013. After reading this, it is even more clear. Wii U obviously underperformed drastically last year but the 3DS is the real reason for the current struggle.

They were clearly banking on 3DS to Make up for the Wii U delays. Once they realized that HD development had pushed back Wii U plans they needed 3DS to more than make up for it.

Instead, it failed big time. (At that purpose)

Just to be clear, the question and answers for Iwata was not 2012 but last year April (i.e. 9 months ago talking about this the year that we are currently in)

The fact that they haven't made an operating profit in 3 years is crazy, the WiiU has been a bust and the 3DS isn't selling enough to make up for it. Nintendo's kind of stuck in a rut for now. They can't really do anything drastic to improve the WiiU or 3DS.

It was published Jan. 31 2013.

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

As for the external factors, this past year the 3DS had every advantage for sales to rise in all territories.
Pokemon release worldwide, Animal Crossing western release, Japan top 10 that included like 8 3DS games, A New Zelda release, a brand new Monster Hunter game that its main rival in the same space is not getting, a cheaper remodel...internal execution that was on a level of 8...9 or even 10 yet Nintendo still had to cut its software and hardware numbers for the console for the year.

There was no way he could have held on to that belief after this past year.

No it wasnt, how could it be since the fiscal year does not end until March 31st.

If you look on the same page, under April 25th 2013, you will see the Q & A section i pulled the information from.

Look again, it was about the third quarter of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2013, not the results of the fiscal year.

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/library/events/130131qa/03.html

Look at the numbers of the link.

Btw: the real date doesn't really matter. It only matters that he misread the market and needed until a few days ago to admit it.