Nintendo Co Ltd’s (TYO:7974) shares plunged on Monday when it was revealed that the firm planned to postpone the release of its highly anticipated successor, the Switch system, from 2024 to 2025.
On February 19, the stock saw its worst intraday decrease since October 2021, falling as much as 8.8% in Tokyo and ending the day down 5.8%.
The company reportedly told its game publishing partners that the next console will launch in the first few months of 2025 instead of the fourth quarter of 2024, according to Bloomberg News.
After driving the stock to an all-time high last week on hopes that the firm will replace the seven-year-old Switch with a new device in 2024, investors may sell off more Nintendo shares.
According to Mr. Mio Kato of LightStream Research, “there seem to be a lot of new Nintendo buyers who may be less familiar with the name and more impatient for the company to put up visible numbers.”
“If Nintendo releases important software later than expected and the current hardware ages out of grace, Nintendo’s financial results for the March 2025 fiscal year could become quite dismal.”
With about 140 million units sold during its lifespan, the Switch, which launched in 2017, is the third-best-selling videogame system of all time, after the Nintendo DS and Sony’s Playstation 2. Super Mario Bros. Wonder and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom were two of the titles that helped the console’s 2023 lifespan extension.