Nintendo shares plunged on Monday after the gaming giant warned sales of its flagship Switch 2 console would fall this fiscal year and after hiking the price of the device due to rising memory costs.
Shares of Nintendo closed 8.4% lower in Tokyo, Japan to 7,020 yen, the lowest since August 2024
The stock has fallen 34% this year. On Friday, Nintendo announced price hikes for its Switch 2 console in markets across the world as an unprecedented surge in the price of memory chips, driven by the AI infrastructure boom, has increased the cost of producing the device. Nintendo said that it forecasts 16.5 million unit sales of the Switch 2 in the current fiscal year, which ends in March 2027, down from 19.86 million since its launch in June last year.
The predicted fall in sales of the less than one-year-old console is raising concerns among investors. “Nintendo is predicting Switch 2 hardware sales to go down this fiscal year — instead of going up as it usually is the case with new consoles,” Serkan Toto, CEO of Kantan Games, told CNBC on Monday. “The biggest factor is of course the price hike that Nintendo thinks will lead to softer demand.” Nintendo has a reputation for issuing conservative guidance. Toto said the latest numbers are likely no different. “I believe that Nintendo is, as usual, lowballing because users will get used to the new price of the console over time,” Toto said. Kazunori Ito, director at Morningstar, said in a note on Sunday that Nintendo’s guidance was “overly conservative.” “We believe the console price hike was inevitable given the prolonged inflation in memory costs.