Nintendo's latest Financial Results released.

Yesterday, 25th July 2007, Nintendo Japan released its "Consolidated Results for the Three Months Ended June 2006 and 2007, and Year Ended March 2007", essentially meaning their first quarter (April - June 2007) financial results in mixed and very loosely translated English (hahaha...)

In this report, the cumulative Wii hardware sales now stand at 9.27 million worldwide (2.95 mil in Japan, 3.81mil in Americas, 2.51mil in others territories), while cumulative DS (including DS and DS Lite) sales are at a whopping 47.27 million (18.11mil in Japan, 14.14 mil in Americas and 15.03mil in other territories). That's a lot of hardware sold, and confirming that the Wii and DS is selling like hotcakes.

Nintendo had previously had forecast Wii hardware shipments of 14 million for this financial year, but it has since revised that number upwards to 16.5 million units. This will mean that Nintendo is expecting the total Wii worldwide installed base to increase to 22 million units by financial year end!

How significant is these set of numbers, especially for Wii? Well, Microsoft said this week that it sold 11.6 million Xbox 360 systems worldwide through June, which would put it at just little more than two million systems ahead of Wii. And given that Microsoft has very little foothold in Japan, where Wii continues to dominate, Nintendo's console could and very likely will become market leader before the end of the year, if not sooner.

So this could also be one of the reasons Microsoft is rumored to announce a USD50 price cut for the Xbox360 (as per previous article).