Thank you for coming to "Nintendo Conference 2008 Fall" today despite your busy schedule. I'm Iwata, president of Nintendo.

It was December 2, 2004, when Nintendo launched Nintendo DS in Japan with "The Expansion of Gaming Population" as its basic strategy. Exactly three years and 10 months have passed since then.

As the first topic for today, let me introduce you to the new member of Nintendo DS family, ...

... "Nintendo DSi."

The "Nintendo DSi" is the third model of the Nintendo DS platform, following Nintendo DS and Nintendo DS Lite, ...

... and we have developed "Nintendo DSi" with the aim to further expand the Nintendo DS market.
First of all, I'd like to talk about the background of how we came to start developing "Nintendo DSi."

We have developed the original Nintendo DS with the basic mission to expand the gaming population. Together with a number of attractive software with different appealing natures, Nintendo DS has become the fastest selling video game platform in the Japanese video game market.

The cumulative sales of Nintendo DS have already topped 23 million in Japan alone. Nintendo DS has become the best-selling video game machine in Japan as this sales number has already exceeded that of PlayStation2 from Sony, which used to be the most-sold video game machine here in Japan. According to data from MediaCreate, it took 6 years and 9 months for PlayStation2 to reach 20 million sales.

In contrast, the sales of Nintendo DS reached 20 million in little less than three years, which can tell you about the incredible sales pace of this machine.

Unfortunately, from the start of 2006, the supply of DS could hardly keep pace with the accelerating demand and almost every single unit we shipped was sold through to consumers in the same week of the shipment. We realize these created great inconveniences for our consumers and retailers.
The unprecedented phenomena or abnormal situation could not last forever. As everyone in the industry noticed, the sales of DS stabilized around the summer of last year.
The common belief in this game business was that 20 million hardware sales was the limit in the Japan market, therefore many people appeared to believe the DS market had been saturated.
While today's sales pace is not as active as in the past, it is also true that the current sales volume of DS can be compared with that of the past major platforms, just when they were significantly expanding the market share in Japan. Therefore, I believe if we can leverage the fact that DS has been supported by a wide range of consumers and if we can continue to demonstrate how an enriched lifestyle can be uniquely realized by the portable nature of DS, Nintendo DS still has significant potential for expansion as a video game platform.

The most recent survey we conducted reveals a Japanese DS consumer composition just like this. The graph covers 7 years old from the left, to 74 years old to the right.

People in the wide range of age demographics enjoy playing with Nintendo DS, with a very good proportion between male and female audiences. In this research, 54% of those who were touching DS were female.

Besides the wide-spread user demographics, DS has another unique characteristic. It has the highest number of users per household as a portable video game machine. Though the number was slightly lower than when we researched the last time, the most recent research shows 2.8 people in one household use DS on average.
As the number of users per household include the household with just one person, the high numbers attained by DS and Wii are a testament to the high ratio of the entire-family's involvement with them.

As you know, portable game machines are played by multiple members within one family. While 2.8 people per household are touching DS, one household has 1.8 units of DS on average.
Portable game machines are designed to be enjoyed regardless of time and where you are. The ultimate sales goal is not "one device per household" but "one for each person."