Nintendo's Market Value Briefly Tops Sony's

GameDaily reports on news from Reuters; today for the first time Nintendo outpaced Sony's market value. Note that this isn't Sony's games wing, but the entirety of the Sony corporation. Investor confidence spurred by brisk sales of the DS and Wii pushed Nintendo (briefly) into the top ten earners in the nation of Japan, with such rarefied organizations as Honda, Toyota, and Canon. "Nintendo's shares rose to a record high 46,350 yen in the morning, increasing its overall market value to 6.57 trillion yen ($53 billion), which allowed it to surpass Sony's market capitalization for a time. The company's shares, however, finished the day a bit lower putting Nintendo back in 11th place behind Sony, but still ahead of Panasonic maker Matsushita, whose sales are over eight times larger than Nintendo's. Nintendo's market value closed at 6.39 trillion yen on Monday, just below Sony's 6.48 trillion yen."

Comments

Time to short?

[jandrese]

Sounds to me like Nintendo might be a bit overvalued. The Wii is great, but the games have just been trickling out for it and people are going to lose some of their enthusiasm for the system before too long. I'm not an investor, but I can't see how they can maintain that sort of overinflated valuation for too long.

Re:Time to short?

[Altus]

yes, games have been few and far between for the Wii, but the console has sold like hotcakes. This implies that games will be released for it in the future.

A lot of game development companies bet against the Wii and that was a poor bet for them to make. I'm sure many of them would like to go back and release on the Wii just to get a crack at the installed base. I doubt they will make the same mistake now that the Wii is on the market and outselling the other consoles.

That said, Nintendo is probably close to the peak of its value and would not make a fantastic investment right now. Even if the console continues to sell well and the new games come out and Nintendo is fantastically successful, how much higher can the stock reasonably go?

Re:Time to short?

[DaAdder]

Games have been trickling out since most of the game producers are of the wait-and-see variety.

The Wii's success was soon evident to everyone though and most of the large game makers jumped on the bandwageon. However since games aren't produced in an instant, you'll see an avalanche of games released for the Wii, starting late '07, but mostly throughout, and towards the end of, '08.

News is surfacing that some companies are shifting focus from Sony to Nintendo entirely:
http://kotaku.com/gaming/the-tide/big-japanese-pub lishers-shift-from-sony-to-nintendo-271785.php

My guess is that this'll keep happening unless/until the PS3 somehow manages to pick it sales up significantly and reach some form of critical mass.

Re:Time to short?

[eln]

Hi,

My kids play the Wii constantly. I play it when I get the time to. There, now you've heard from a Wii owner whose system isn't gathering dust.

If you are the kind of person who is out buying 1080p TV sets when they still cost as much as they do, then you're probably also the kind of person who will spend $600 on a game console so you can have the most powerful system on the market. If that's you, then go buy a PS3. Technophiles are not the target market for the Wii.

If you didn't like any of Nintendo's previous offerings, why would you think you would like the Wii? Did you just get one because everyone else was, and you wanted to be part of the crowd? Or did you pretend to get one just so you could troll Slashdot?

I agree with you that Nintendo's stock will fall (although probably not plummet), but not for the reasons you state.

Re:Time to short?

[MeanderingMind]

Hi, I have a 46" HD TV, the sound system to go with it, and an Xbox 360 to play on it. I haven't touched the Xbox except to play movies for some time. Maybe once in the past 6 months (when Armored Core 4 came out).

I also have a Wii.

The Wii is not as impressive graphically as the 360 on the HDTV, but I can not say it looks like crap. It's decent, not "Wow" but decent. The 360 and PS3 are "Wow" when it comes to graphics, I'll give them that much.

However, I play my Wii far more than my other consoles. That's not to say I spend oodles of time playing it, but it garners more of my attention.

If you want a system that looks like crap on an HDTV, get a PS2. Several of my games were literally unplayable because of how it was displayed. It was visibly different than how it would look on an SDTV to the point of being a garbled mess. Unless the game is explicitly HD, it's probably going to look terrible.

I doubt the GP fits into the "trailer trash" stereotype anymore than I do. There are far better arguments to make against the Wii than ad hominem attacks. You're intelligent enough to spell, you should be intelligent enough to come up with something more substancial than pure insults.

Re:Explains what step 2 was

[SydShamino]

If you are a corporate execute at Sony's console division:

1. Buy Nintendo stock
2. Open your mouth
3. Profit!

Just Another Manic Monday...

[StikyPad]

A) Sorry, with a P/E of 31 (in times of plenty), this is a good example of an overinflated stock with unsustainable growth. (Sony's P/E is also high at 54 since investors are betting the PS3 will take off at some point -- I think they're right, but I still don't think it's a good buy.)

B) If Nintendo doesn't either start putting out some quality titles, or convincing third parties to do it for them, the Wii excitement will quickly turn to Wiimorse. I really *want* to like this console, but I haven't found a game yet that holds my attention, or my son's, with the exception of Paper Mario, and the caveat that it was too difficult for him, and too easy/tedious for anyone with a little Mario experience under their belt. And why it doesn't support either the "classic controller" (when holding the Wiimote sideways is anything but ergonomic) or motion sensing (when that's the main selling point of the console) is beyond me. Anyway, yeah. More and better games -- and soon!

Wiimorse? I don't think so. Wii wins hands down

[Drake42]

I'm not employed by any game company. If I had any financial motivation it would be toward MS winning since I can code games on their console using their open dev tools.

That said, the Wii kicks and continues to kick everyone else's ass. Last night after playing so much golden axe and boxing that I couldn't stand it any more I decided "Hey I want to see some better graphics" I loaded up my 360, looked at the games I had available and none of them sounded all that appealing. I tried "Small Arms" and it just didn't look so amazing that it was more fun to play. Same with PocketBike. Considered loading up Dead Rising but didn't want to invest the time. Nothing else grabbed me so I went right back to the Wii for a few more rounds of tennis and went to bed.

Like it or Hate it, the Wii has more staying power than any of the other consoles, graphics or not. You can say that Nintendo stock is over priced if you want, but people said that about google for ages and then their stock price rose anyway.

People are fundamentally fed up with products that don't work / don't do what they claim / are so over-hyped that I have to tune them out just to think. The people of the world want simple services that actually and reliably work. Google and Nintendo are delivering that and so the market is rewarding them and will continue to do so for quite some time. I'm betting that I'll have a lot more fun playing Smash Brothers with my friends than playing Halo with whiny ass, vomit talking, on-line clans.

I love my 360. And someday I'll buy a (lower cost) PS3 just for the eye candy. But when I want to play a game, I keep on going back to the Wii even after having it for quite a while.

Re:Do one thing

[ceoyoyo]

Nonsense. GM runs a really good loan business. They just have to work out how to make their loss leaders (cars) a bit more efficiently.

Re:Great news

[AuMatar]

Actually, its 90% idiots and fanboys. You make your money by predicting how the idiots and fanboys will react.

In this case it wasn't fanboyism. I saw one company about to go out on a limb with an innovative new product. I saw another company about to go out with an overpriced product that didn't provide much more than their last generation. I saw a lot of buzz among the gaming community about the innovative new product. I decided I had room in my portfolio for some risk, took it, and made a decent chunk of change.

Re:and I remember people talking of Nintendos Demi

[MeanderingMind]

I distinctly remember people talking about Nintendo following the Sega model and refocusing only on games. These people were not necessarily informed, but discussion did happen on a semi-regular basis across interested forums. I believe it peaked around the PSP's launch.

At the time the DS was moving slowly, and the PSP's launch was impressive. The "Revolution" was a long ways off, and its features pure speculation. Given they were last in the console market (by market share) and the PSP looked set to steal the handheld market at that time, threads hailing or lamenting the demise of Nintendo as a hardware company were not uncommon. Despite the Gamecube making pure profit, it was hard to imagine that Nintendo could continue making consoles if their market kept shrinking.

People also talked about the Xbox "vastly" outselling the Gamecube. Why? Fanboys of the time would cite specific regions, months, etc. to slant the facts. Just because it was wrong doesn't mean it wasn't spoken.

As a last note, the Gamecube and N64 profits were significant even if they may have been less than the Gameboy Advance (I'm not going to commit either way without numbers). Assuming a mere $1 profit was made on each console sold, that's $50 million in hardware sales. That's distributed over 10 years, but we're making about the harshest assumption possible about systems that were never sold at loss during their time; We're also ignoring software sales, accessories and licensing fees.