Namco Bandai profits rise 20%

Namco Bandai has generated gross profit of 1.3bn (167.5bn) for its financial year ending March 2012, but expects fewer games to arrive over the next 12 months.

This represents a year-on-year increase of around 20 per cent. Meanwhile, net sales jumped 15 per cent to 3.5bn (454.2bn), and net income rose a colossal 1,044 per cent from 14.3m (1.84bn) to 149m (19.3bn).

Namco Bandai expects gross profit to fall to 159bn – 94.9 per cent – for its next financial year.The publisher anticipates a 25 per cent decrease in the number of releases it publishes during its next financial year – down from 239 to a predicted 177 year-on-year.

Most of the publisher’s overall sales – 378.4bn worth – came from Japan. Europe was the second biggest territory with sales of 33.3bn, while the US generated sales of 24.3bn and Asia totalled 18.1bn.

Games were the most popular part of Namco Bandai’s content business in FY 2012, with 86bn in sales. In comparison, arcade game machines generated sales of 73.4bn.

Namco Bandai sold 23.3m games worldwide over the past year. 11.5m of these were sold in Japan, 5.9m in the US and 5.8m in Europe. It expects these figures to change to 9.1m, 7.2m and 3.7m during its next fiscal year – a total of 20m sales down from 23.3m.

Dark Souls was the company’s most popular game released over the past 12 months, with worldwide sales of 1.19m. Ace Combat Assault Horizon followed with 1.07m sales and One Piece Kaizoku Musou with 940,000 sales.

Soul Calibur V sold 690,000 units and the Ben 10 racing game sold 460,000.