Nintendo hardware has been maintaining its 60% plus market share in Europe but saw a small decline in 2009.

This graph shows the transition of the European software market. Wii in 2009 was able to outnumber its 2008 unit sales figure, but due to sharp drops in Nintendo DS and PSP unit sales, the whole European software market experienced a decline.

Those who have read our Financial Highlights that we issued yesterday and noticed that our shipments of Nintendo DS software in Europe and several other countries were down more than 40% year-on-year must be wondering what happened in the European Nintendo DS software market. When we compare the sell-thru numbers in the four European countries in this graph, the sales numbers at the retailers were down about 20%. Starting from fall of last year, European retailers were taking an extremely conservative attitude in placing purchase orders. Also, the difference in sales between the software titles that are hits and the software that are not has widened. This is the background against which this situation unraveled. On the other hand, when it comes to repeat orders in small lots that our European retailers have been making from the beginning of this year, we hear they are becoming more active than they used to be a year ago especially for those of our third party publishers,. Using this opportunity, I wanted to confirm that the European Nintendo DS software market has not shrunk simply in accordance with the decrease in our shipments.

While the software sales for Nintendo platforms have maintained over half the share of the whole market, small share decline was observed due to the decrease in Nintendo DS software sales.

We have combined the sales data from UK, Germany, France and Spain to make this graph.

Europe in 2009 saw a bigger decline than the one experienced in U.S. Please note that, when we make the comparison between 2008 and 2009 based upon sales in euro, we have to take into account the negative factor of the significant depreciation of British Pound against the euro, not just the decreases in the hardware and software sales and the hardware trade price cuts.

Nintendo products had been able to increase their shares in Europe consistently and by a margin, but 2009 saw a small decrease when compared with 2008.

You may have already seen some media reports about this, but I'd like to take this opportunity to share with you the new milestones Nintendo reached in December 2009.

Family Computer System, called Nintendo Entertainment System or NES in short in overseas markets, had sold 61.91 million units, which was the largest unit sales figure for any Nintendo home videogame consoles.

The cumulative sales of Wii hardware from Nintendo to our distributors and retail customers reached 67.45 million units as of the end of December 2009. It has replaced NES to become the best selling Nintendo home videogame console of all time.

Among handheld hardware, GameBoy series have sold through 118.69 million units in total since the launch, which was the largest unit sales figure among all Nintendo's hardware products.

As of the end of December 2009, when Wii marked the record LTD sales as the number one selling Nintendo home console, the life-to-date shipments of Nintendo DS series reached 125.13 million units, which has now become largest sales figure among all of the Nintendo's videogame hardware.

Needless to say, these are just two milestones of a larger journey in our efforts to reach the ultimate goal of bringing one home console for every household and one handheld for everyone.