Nintendo is now the most valuable it has ever been as a company in its entire history.
As reported by Automaton West, its Tokyo stock exchange listing experienced a three day streak, culminating to it hitting ¥ 9,775 on January 23. This is the highest valuation the company has ever had since it joined the stock market. It had previously reached its highest valuation on January 17, shortly after its first-look trailer for the Switch 2.
At the time, we reported that that stock value immediately dropped in Japan, a perplexing turn of events as Nintendo’s American stock exchange listing was on the upturn.
Automaton cites their source as Japanese news outlet Kabutan, and it seems they know why Japan’s stock market had an about face. According to Kabutan, Japan’s famous Toyo Securities raised their rating for Nintendo’s stock from buy to strong buy.
Toyo also increased their sales forecast for the Switch 2 from 14 to 16 million units, based on the assumption that the console will release by early July. They also increased their prediction for Nintendo’s operating profit for the next fiscal year from ¥ 465 to ¥ 480 billion.
Toyo even increased their target share price to ¥ 12,300, which may be the key detail that helped raise the companies actual share price closer to that amount. If Nintendo still gets all that luck from heaven, they may very well live up to these expectations.
By the way, this is the same Toyo Securities who confronted Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki in Sony’s financial earnings call to make him explain why Bungie was scaling down their projects and laying off their workers. Toyo is not known in the West, but they are to Japan what the likes of Merrill Edge and JPMorgan are in America.
So these predictions aren’t coming from overeager Nintendo fans, but from business people who have seen Nintendo create miracles in the video game industry. These are the people who tried to figure out why this Japanese company didn’t go the way of Sunsoft or Data East, and reemerged as Sony’s rival instead of being subsumed by it.
Nintendo certainly creates a lot of hopes in Japan, the US, and the rest of the world, and not only in the video game industry itself. While we await announcements for the console, expectations are now high that it will get a staggering level of third party support that the company has not seen since the Super Famicom/SNES days. And Nintendo is clearly still hiding some secrets about this console, so we are really just getting started here.
