Shuntaro Furukawa will only be officially appointed the new president of Nintendo in June 2018 but he is already revealing his future plans for when he’s in charge of the Japanese games giant. Taking over the company in what is arguably its best form in many years, the young CEO-to-be wants to discover the next Pokemon Go hit and that means developing more mobile games.
In an interview with Nikkei, Furukawa wants to develop the mobile games division of Nintendo into a business worth 100 billion yen, which roughly converts to around $910 million. He said: “From what I can see, smartphone games are the ones I want to expand the most.”
That’s not going to be easy to do, considering that Nintendo’s mobile games division recently reported sales of 39.3 billion yen for the financial fiscal year of 2017. That may seem like a substantial amount but it’s actually a mere four percent of Nintendo’s total financial earnings. In light of that, Furukawa saw fit to remind everyone of what the principles of Nintendo mean to him when he said: “The idea that something will emerge that transforms into something big, in the same manner as game consoles, is the defining motif of the Nintendo business.”
However, he also admits that the success enjoyed by Pokemon Go would be hard to replicate when he told Nikkei that: “Pokemon Go, which transformed the story and gameplay for the smartphone, became a huge realization. I can’t say that there are any that are like that among mobile games now in development.”
Additionally, Nintendo’s next president also plans to strengthen the position of the Nintendo Switch in regions outside of Japan, US and Europe. He specifically mentions the Middle East and Southeast Asia, which might mean better support for Nintendo products in these regions in the future.
Nintendo recently announced its next president, alongside its financial earnings for the past year which shows that the company expects to earn its best profits in eight years. The success of the Nintendo Switch has contributed to this as the sales of the hybrid console has exceeded 17 million. However, it looks like the company’s latest product offering, Nintendo Labo, isn’t doing too well in its recent debut in several vital regions around the world, especially in Japan and the UK.
