The Japanese companies Sony and Nintendo have presented their annual results for 2021 on Tuesday and both agree on one point: their 2022 figures will be worse due to the worsening of the chip crisis.
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The video game company Nintendo maintained the rate in its fiscal year of 2021, closed last March, in which it registered a net profit of 477,691 million yen (about 3,470 million euros), thanks to the profitability of its Switch console and its games. The figure is 0.6% lower than that recorded a year earlier, when the Japanese developer and distributor made a record profit from the boom in its social simulator “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” at the worst time of the pandemic and lockdowns. , and that it was a console sales driver that it lacked in the following year.
Regarding the operating profit of the company based in Kyoto (western Japan), it fell by 7.5% year-on-year, to 592,760 million yen (4,310 million euros), and its turnover decreased by 3.6%, up to 1.69 trillion yen (12.32 billion), according to its financial report published on Tuesday.
Sony, for its part, obtained a net profit of 882,000 million yen (6,399 million euros) in fiscal year 2021, a year-on-year drop of 14% attributed to losses in its insurance branch. It expects to earn even less this 2022 due to the shortage of semiconductors and the increase in costs.
The Japanese corporation recorded an operating profit of 1.2 trillion yen (8,707 million euros), which represents 26% more and a record figure, according to the results announced this Tuesday, corresponding to the year that started in April 2021 and concluded at the end of last March.
The results of both companies were favored by the strong devaluation of the yen, especially during the first quarter of the calendar year (and equivalent to the last quarter of the Japanese fiscal year), when the Japanese currency accelerated its depreciation against the dollar and the euro.
In the case of Sony, this evolution offset the negative effect of the aforementioned restructuring of the Japanese giant’s insurance branch, which cost it 16.8 billion yen (121 million euros), as well as the decrease in demand for video games in 2021 compared to a 2020 marked by the first and hardest phases of confinement in many countries.
Nintendo also suffered from this drop in sales of its game consoles. The company sold 23.06 million Switch units, down 20% from sales a year earlier, a decline that Nintendo attributed to Animal Crossing’s lack of gold and a shortage of semiconductors and other key components in Switch production. consoles, also due to interruptions in supply chains, which has been impacting numerous manufacturers around the world.
Instead, its software sales did improve in 2021, growing 1.8% to a record 235.07 million copies. The company has sold a total of 822.18 million game units.
Both companies say that the shortage of semiconductors and other key components in the production of consoles, as well as the interruptions in supply chains, will cause their profits to fall during the next financial year. Nintendo foresees a decrease of 5.6% to 500,000 million yen (3,630 million euros), while Sony puts the figure at 6%, to 830,000 million yen (6,021 million euros).
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