I have mentioned that we were not able to keep the momentum of Wii sales in the first half of last year, due to the lack of hit titles. During our Financial Result Briefing in July and in our Corporate Management Policy Briefing in October last year, I have stated our plan to rejuvenate the Wii business by consecutively launching three much-anticipated titles; Wii Sports Resort, Wii Fit Plus and New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Now I would like to explain how these titles are selling.

First, about Wii Sports Resort.

Since its launch, our cumulative global sales of the software to our distributors and retail customers reached 13.58million units at the end of December.

Next, about Wii Fit Plus.

The cumulative global sales reached 10.16 million units globally, and approximately 55% of them are bundled with Wii Balance Board. The bundle package was selling well especially in the U.S. and European markets. Following the year-end sales season in these regions, our supply of the bundled SKU could not fully catch up with the demands from consumers, and we had to face lost sales opportunities.

Because the original Wii Fit has sold 22.56 million units worldwide, this means that there are now more than 28 million Wii Balance Boards sold.

Finally, even though it has not been long since its launch, our unit sales figure for New Super Mario Bros. Wii reached 10.55 million worldwide at the end of the year. It's one of our fastest selling software to reach the 10 million unit sales mark.

This is the chart I showed during the Corporate Management Policy Briefing last October. When a purchase of a software is registered with Club Nintendo with the registration of Wii hardware in the same week, we interpret that as the software driving the purchase of the hardware. This chart shows the percentages of the cumulative sales of these software that drove Wii hardware sales as of October of last year.

Why don't we look at the corresponding Club Nintendo data on the subject three key titles in order to see how they are performing today?

Here it is.
Wii Fit Plus, in the middle of this chart, shows particularly high hardware-purchase drive ratios. Ratio of New Super Mario Bros. Wii can be considered good enough as it has not been long since launch.

Considering how the late 2008 launches of such then-anticipated titles such as Wii Music and Animal Crossing Wii were selling a year ago from today, we have to say that these three titles have been able to keep rather healthy sales transitions. Nintendo would like to keep its efforts to maintain their sales momentums in order to keep the momentum of Wii platform and its products.

On a global shipment basis as of the end of last year, Nintendo DS titles which had shipped more than a million units increased by three from first party, that includes Nintendo and Pokémon company, to become 45, and by three from third party publishers to become 63.

As for Wii, Wii titles which had shipped more than a million units increased by one from first party, that includes Nintendo and Pokémon, to become 22, and by eleven from third party publishers to become 54.

As you can see, Nintendo DS and Wii have been trying to pioneer a new horizon to expand the gaming population. In order for us to further continue the gaming population expansion, we understand there must be an inevitable challenge for us.

More specifically, we are now seeing situations where those who had never visited game retailers are now going there.
Expansion of our customer base requires us to take brand new approaches on how we sell our products at retail outlets.

This is one of the Japanese "Iwata Asks" articles that we posted last week on our Japanese official web site. Since the first "Iwata Asks" article, I have been interviewing employees working on and developing Nintendo products. The article you are seeing now is the very first "Iwata Asks" article in which I interviewed Nintendo employees who have been in charge of marketing our products.

I'd like you to read through this Japanese article on our web site if you have not yet done so because the article explains the details of the searching guide system, including its background. With the expansion of our customer base, we believe in the need of "the concept of development" in order to deal with new sales and marketing activities at retail outlets and are challenging ourselves with new approaches by calling it "Sales Development."