Nintendo reports six-month loss

Platform holder Nintendo has revealed that it has suffered a 2.01bn ($25m) loss for the six months ending September 30th 2010. This compares to a 69.5bn profit in the same period a year before.

Operating income fell from 104.4bn to 54.23bn while net sales fell significantly from 548.06bn to 363.16bn.

Wii hardware sales fell from 575m to 497m though DS sales declines were far sharper – they dropped from 1.18bn to 699m, with around half of these coming from sales of the DSi XL.

Overall hardware sales fell from 312.56bn to 194,45bn. Software sales dropped from 234.19bn to 167.92bn.

In total 6.69m DS consoles were sold (last year that number stood at 11.7m) and 54.84m games. Wii console unit sales hit 4.97m (down from 5.57m) and game sales reached 65.21m units.

For the period up to an including the end of March Nintendo expects to sell 4m 3DS consoles and 15m 3DS games. The company has also revised its Wii software sales prediction by 3m units, though it says that this is due to increased bundling activity with the hardware this Christmas.