Toyo Securities is a Japanese financial services company that’s made themselves famous among gamers for how aggressively they chime in on the video game industry.
Last year, it was a Toyo Securities analyst who asked Sony’s then COO Hiroki Totoki point blank to explain the situation around Bungie. More recently, Toyo’s valuation and analysis of the Switch 2 led to Nintendo reaching its highest ever stock valuation last January. One could argue that maybe they favor Nintendo.
In August of last year, Toyo Securities analyst Hideki Yasuda made the bold prediction that the Switch 2 would be releasing in the second half of next year. This flew in the face of rampant speculation that the device would be coming sometime in the last few months of 2024. While we have yet to see if Yasuda’s prediction was correct, those other rumors were definitively proven wrong.
As reported by GoNintendo, Yasuda himself has once again spoken up about their predictions for the Switch 2. As expected, Yasuda has high expectations for the console. But, he also made an interesting claim, that does match up with some other rumors and speculation.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz’s Japan division, Yasuda claims that Nintendo ramped up manufacturing of the Switch 2 in the 3rd quarter of the last fiscal year. In the Roman calendar year, that would be the 4th quarter of 2024. And that does line up with speculation that Nintendo finally launched mass manufacturing of the device in the final months of that year.
Yasuda believes that Nintendo has the potential to sell as many as 6 million Switch 2 units, not in its first year, but in its first quarter. That may seem like unreasonable expectations, but it must be said that the original Switch sold 2.74 million units in its first quarter, when the only game available on it was The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
We can imagine why Yasuda believes those sales numbers could more than double. Nintendo is coming in with a great hype cycle, and they also have a lot of returning Switch owners who’ll want to upgrade or append to their platforms with a Switch 2.
Yasuda goes so far as to clam that Nintendo wants to create a situation where the PlayStation will no longer be able to catch up. We don’t know if Yasuda believes Nintendo cares about hitting the Guiness World Records on sales numbers. But in terms of taking market share to increase their own sales, we can see why Nintendo would plan to dominate the console space over Sony and Microsoft.
Really though, if the Switch 2 becomes a huge success, that would be good news for Sony and Microsoft. The industry is looking for the next big thing to make business pick up, and anything, even a competing console, would be helpful in that regard. So in that sense, everyone in the industry is rooting for Nintendo.
