📉 Nintendo just closed the most lucrative fiscal year in its history. Net sales nearly doubled, the Switch 2 became the fastest-selling console the company has ever made, and profit hit a record. So here's the puzzle: the stock has shed more than half its value since last August, even as Japan's benchmark Nikkei index blew past 70,000 for the first time ever. On Friday, June 26, at the annual shareholder meeting in Kyoto, president Shuntaro Furukawa stood in front of more than a thousand investors and came about as close to an apology as a Nintendo CEO gets.
A blockbuster year the market shrugged off
The numbers from the fiscal year that ended March 31 are not the numbers of a company in trouble. Net sales reached ¥2.31 trillion (about $14.3 billion at roughly ¥162 to the dollar), up 98.6% from a year earlier. Operating profit climbed 27.5% to ¥360.1 billion ($2.2 billion); ordinary profit jumped 45.6% to ¥542.1 billion ($3.4 billion). The Switch 2, launched in June 2025, sold 19.86 million units across its first fiscal year on the market, 3.5 million of them in the first four days alone, a Nintendo record. Software moved 48.71 million units, with Mario Kart World accounting for 14.7 million.
Nintendo HQ, Kyoto. Photo: Insightwm / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
And yet the share price tells the opposite story. Nintendo touched ¥14,795 (about $91) last August, an all-time high. By the close on June 25 it sat at ¥6,859 ($42), down roughly 54% in ten months. According to the Asahi Shimbun, more than a thousand shareholders filled the Kyoto hall, and some asked the company point-blank to do something about the price. Furukawa told them he had caused "great concern," pinned part of the blame on May's price increase, and made a promise: keep spreading the Switch 2, widen the fan base, and "show results through performance."
Why investors soured on a winner
Share prices run on expectations, not on last year's receipts, and Nintendo's own forecast is the problem. For the year ending March 2027, the company guides hardware down 16.9% to 16.5 million units, net sales down about 11%, and ordinary profit down roughly 21%. Its own explanation: with the Switch 2, "sales were more concentrated in the launch year" than with past machines. Translated out of corporate-speak, the launch boom was front-loaded, and year two is smaller by design.
Then came the May price hike, the trigger Furukawa himself named. The Switch 2 rose to ¥59,980 in Japan ($371) from May 25, and Western markets move to $499.99 / €499.99 from September. Nintendo blamed an AI-driven memory shortage pushing chip costs up, plus US tariffs. A jump on a console already criticized as expensive risks slowing the very adoption Nintendo is counting on. The company is fighting on a second front, too: back in March it sued the US government over the tariffs on imported Switch 2 units.
So the market is doing what markets do, pricing the slowdown before it shows up in the accounts.
The trap every console maker walks into
This isn't really a Nintendo problem. Hardware stocks tend to peak with the hype around a new machine and fade once the launch wave breaks, and anyone who has followed Sony or Microsoft through a console cycle knows the rhythm. The riskiest moment for the share price often comes right after the best sales quarter, because from there the only surprises left tend to be on the downside.
How the American gaming names stack up
Zoom out to the US, and Nintendo's slump looks less like an outlier than one note in a messy chord.
Roblox fell harder. Its stock dropped about 71% from a September 2025 peak to a low in mid-May 2026, even as revenue, bookings, and free cash flow all grew more than 39% over the same window. That's not a broken business; it's a brutal repricing of a growth stock that ran too hot.
Take-Two went the other way. With Grand Theft Auto VI locked for November 19, 2026, the first new mainline GTA in more than 13 years and the follow-up to a game that has sold around 230 million copies, the stock has held near $240, and roughly 30 of 32 analysts rate it a buy. One unreleased game is carrying a company's valuation: the mirror image of Nintendo's hardware-cycle problem.
And Electronic Arts left the public market altogether. In late 2025 a consortium led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners agreed to take EA private at $210 a share, a 25% premium and the largest all-cash buyout of its kind on record.
Three of the biggest names in Western gaming, three completely different outcomes. The common thread: through 2025 and into 2026, owning a gaming stock had remarkably little to do with whether the games were selling.
What overseas investors are weighing
For a dollar-based investor, Nintendo's decline stings twice. The shares fell about 54% in yen, but the yen itself has slid to its weakest level since 1986, near ¥162 to the dollar, which deepens the loss on conversion back home. Most foreign investors hold Nintendo through its Tokyo listing or an over-the-counter ADR, and both carry that currency drag.
The bull case is simple: a company printing record cash, sitting on a huge installed base, trading at half its high. The bear case is the calendar. November 2026 brings GTA VI and the core of the holiday quarter, about the toughest backdrop imaginable for a console heading into a deliberately quieter second year. Furukawa's "show results" line is, in the end, a wager that the games will say what the spreadsheet right now cannot.
Nintendo is a clean illustration of something that trips a lot of people up: a company can be winning while its stock is losing, at the same time, for entirely rational reasons. In Kyoto, small shareholders packed a hall to say exactly that to management's face. Where you are, do everyday investors get that kind of direct line to a company's leadership, and would a record year buy a CEO any patience at all?
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