Nintendo's Annual Revenue Figures

Nintendo keeps a wealth of information on its investor relations site, including financial figures going back into the early 1980s. In future columns we can dig into some of the interesting data there, but for the moment let us simply look at the total sales, or revenue, that Nintendo has generated in the past 18 years, going back to its fiscal year 1990, which ended in March 1991.

There are going to be a series of similar graphs here, but just bear with us: you'll want to see them in order to get the full effect of the last one.

First, let us look at Nintendo's revenue from 1991 to 1996, when the Super Nintendo (SNES) was the company's lead console:



It is interesting to see Nintendo's worldwide revenue increase up until 1993 and then decrease, right up to the launch of Nintendo's next console. This “bump” in revenue repeats itself throughout Nintendo's history. In fact, Nintendo's next console, the Nintendo 64, gives rise to a similar bump in revenue. Here, we show Nintendo's total worldwide sales from 1996 to 2001.



After this bump in revenue comes a third bump from the era of the GameCube, running from 2001 to 2006.



All of that was just an exercise to prepare you for Nintendo's revenue since that fiscal year ending in March 2006. To give the proper perspective, we've shown all 18 years from 1991 to 2008 in one complete graph:



After three little hills of revenue for its previous three consoles, suddenly Nintendo has a literal mountain of money during the Wii era. For the fiscal year ending in March 2007, Nintendo's revenue jumped to over $8 billion, far above its revenue in the previous decade and a half. Then in the fiscal year which ended in March of this year, Nintendo's revenue jumped to over $16 billion. The net profit on that $16 billion was a cool $2.5 billion.

For your amusement, we have prepared a small animation demonstrating the eras of Nintendo's last four consoles. Click here to see the results.

Addendum

This column will be on hiatus briefly until sometime in June while the author is on assignment. You can still look forward to reporting on the April sales figures from NPD when they are released in mid-May.