Here are the sales transitions of home consoles in the European market.

As I said earlier, the sales volume accelerated in the year-end, and in December the Nintendo 3DS was the best selling hardware in Europe. Also, when we combine the sales of the Nintendo 3DS and the Nintendo DS, it outnumbers the previous year for the highest weekly sales, but when we look at week 43 to 46 in this chart, just like Wii, we can see how slowly the year-end sales started last year.

This chart shows the yearly hardware unit sales during the past three years in the four main countries in Europe. We have tallied the numbers for the U.K., Germany, France and Spain to see the pan-European trend.
The proportion of handhelds to home consoles is in between Japan and the U.S. For European hardware sales last year, the Nintendo 3DS, PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii all sold about the same amount, and none of them were able to become the market leader.

This chart shows the yearly software unit sales during the past three years in the four main countries in Europe. In Europe, there was a large decline in handheld software because of the recent lack of hit titles for handheld hardware.
From a total software market perspective, the total number of software units sold decreased for two years consecutively because of the decrease in sales of handheld software.

For the current fiscal year, we have been confronted with great changes in business conditions, including the steep appreciation of the yen. Also, the sales pace of the Nintendo 3DS after its launch was not in line with our original scenario, and the company made the significant price drop in order to make the course correction and place it back on the originally expected sales track. Furthermore, the company was unable to launch much-anticipated titles in a timely fashion in the first half of the term. Under these circumstances, our business performance will be the worst since we went into business in the video game industry.
I understand that what are being challenged are our prospects on how Nintendo will be able to get back to a situation where it can generate steady profits from the next fiscal year and beyond in spite of such a severe business environment. Please let me explain about them.

I would like to begin with the product profitability of the Nintendo 3DS hardware, which has affected our profit the most for the current fiscal year. Let me first inform you that, in the first half of the next fiscal term, we are now anticipating to get out of the situation that we sell the hardware below cost.

The sales pace of the Nintendo 3DS drastically increased worldwide in the last year-end sales season and it was found out that, for the first year after the launch, the platform was selling at a faster pace than either the Nintendo DS or the Wii. This brought a pleasant surprise to the video game industry and changed the thoughts of third-party software developers for the better. We are now expecting a strong software lineup for the platform.
The specific titles will be released by each software developer, so I will not mention them here.  I can say, however, that there will be more and more highly-anticipated titles for the Nintendo 3DS even in the U.S. and Europe where home console game systems lead the market.

In addition, we absolutely need to keep the vitality of evergreen titles and release new key titles seamlessly for the Nintendo 3DS in order to maintain the momentum of the platform throughout the year.

The two games featuring Mario released at the end of last year, “SUPER MARIO 3D LAND” and “Mario Kart 7” made the centerpiece of evergreen titles. We will maintain the momentum of these two titles and, at the same time, try to expand the sales of the titles which have the potential to be sold continuously along with the popularization of the hardware, as typified by “nintendogs+cats,” Capcom’s “Monster Hunter 3 (Tri) G” (Japanese title) in Japan and “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D” overseas.

Furthermore, here you can see the strong lineup of titles to be released in the current fiscal year. And, in the next term,

we intend to release these various titles without any extreme interruptions. In addition to what you can see here, a number of titles unannounced from third-party developers will be available. Although there is no logo here, we are planning to release a totally new side-scrolling action Super Mario in 2D as a key title for the Nintendo 3DS in the next fiscal year.
With the fulfillment of software, we are confident that we will be able to make the Nintendo 3DS active for the full year as the mainstream platform in the video game market.