Nintendo Yearly Sales, Profits Beat Estimates

The once undisputed king of video game consoles appears to be back.

Led by the widespread success of the Wii console, Nintendo revised its sales and profit numbers for its fiscal year that ended in March for the fourth time, with higher than expected demand for DS games also contributing.

"Merchandise does not move in the January-March quarter--that is the norm in this industry," Nintendo spokesman Yasuhiro Minagawa told Reuters. "But ours somehow did."

Sales are expected to total $8.1 billion, up from a previous forecast of $7.58 billion. The new forecasted numbers are well above analysts' estimates.

Nintendo's stock responded favorably to the news, and closed up over 2 percent to 34,350 yen in Thursday trading on the Nikkei Stock Exchange. In the past year alone the stock has doubled, while much of the market has struggled to stay positive.

In Japan and the United States, the Wii outsold the PS3 by a combined two-to-one margin during February. In Japan alone, eight of the 10 best-selling games were DS titles, Japanese game mag Enterbrain reported.

The success of the Nintendo DS likely had a lot to do with Sony's announcement this week that it was cutting the price of the PSP in the US by 15 percent. The DS also is expected to outsell the PSP by over a two-to-one margin.

Revised net profit numbers were not provided, although the company said it expected the new figures to be above the 120 billion yen ($1.01 billion USD) given in the last upward revision, which would have already been a record.