invest in the next console?

during the gc life they baught back a few billion dollars in shares to prevent a take over ill see if i can find a link for you guys

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/newsArt.cfm?artid=9850
nintendo buys $391mill of their shares back

http://cube.ign.com/articles/426/426078p1.html
$728 mill to prevent take over

http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2005/8/26/1055
$220 mill shares

they have prolly baught back more shares along the way to, this would eat into their funds (all $$ is listed in US$)

Well if I recall correctly Nintendo spends like 500-million in R&D each generation, per console. So there goes a ton of money right their I mean Nintendo spends money faster then any other publisher I'd say. Nintendo has always maintained profitable dominance even during the GameCube generation Nintendo managed to maintain higher profits then expected.

So where does Nintendo's vast wealth go?

Well look at its higher ups and former bosses of Nintendo like Hiroshi Yamauchi the richest person in Japan and 149th wealthiest man on the earth. Nintendo operates multiple global head quarters all that handle their own marketing and distribution.

 Many of these global headquarters were openned in the 90's such as Nintendo Of Canada and Nintendo Of Europe etc...etc... Nintendo built their headquarters all over the globe during the SNES days expanding into almost every viable market. Each of those buildings and headquarters would have cost millions to start and billions to maintain over the years!

Lastly Nintendo is the largest games publisher on the earth. They develope more games then any other publisher though EA is coming close. Nintendo maintain an extremely high quality standard that has meant products are delayed and worked on for longer periods of time this all costs money.

Constant aquisitions. In Japan Nintendo has been aquiring smaller studios and obsorbing them, in the GameBoy days GameFreak is a perfect example Nintendo poured endless funds into establishing the Pokemon brand which in turn generated billions.

In the last few years Nintendo has boosted its employee numbers higher and higher. Building a new high end game developer from the ground up (Nintendo EAD Tokyo). Nintendo's constant expansions cost billions and their current push to fight off Microsoft and Sony is also costly.

So where does all the money go?

To Nintendo's bosses, share holders, marketing , expansion and domination of the games industry. All of that is very costly! Don't forget Nintendo has over then 8-Billion USD in reserves as far as I know. That is alot of money saved for a rainy day (Another DreamCast/GameCrash)!

I have some Nintendo stock. If my calculations are correct, this year I'll get enough in dividends to pay for Wii Fit, and still have some left for a few beers!

Using all the money they made, Nintendo created devices that actually print money, but only for themselves.