Reggie Fils-Aime (President & COO, Nintendo of America Inc.):
Good morning everyone, and thanks for taking the time to be with us today.

I was emailing back and forth with Mr. Iwata a couple of weeks ago and he asked me why one reporter in the U.S. was saying that Nintendo ‘wouldn’t even be at E3’ this year.
I told him I gave up a long time ago trying to figure out why people report what they do.
But we do understand that changing our approach this year may have caused some confusion.
Our reasoning is pretty simple — different people come to the show with different needs.
And most of you have seen how it’s played out by now.
First, our most important audience is the mass of people around the world, anxiously waiting for headlines from the show. So five hours before the convention center even opened, Mr. Iwata released a new Nintendo Direct with all our latest game news.
Then, two things happened simultaneously.
I know many of you were on hand in the Nokia Theatre as we told our business partners the details on our big software launches for the rest of the year.
And at the same time, in our booth, a lot of reporters were getting the chance to directly interview the developers of those key titles and then immediately play their games — again, before the show had officially opened.
Then last night, we hosted a developers’ roundtable designed to feed the needs of the world’s millions of Pokémon fans.
And finally, we’re also going to change up our approach just a little bit this morning. Before we move to the Q & A, Mr. Iwata will present an up-to-date look at Nintendo’s global performance.

Satoru Iwata (President):
Today, almost seven weeks have passed since we held our Financial Results Briefing on April 25.
I would like to give you a brief overview of what’s happened in the global video game market since then.

I used this graph in the Financial Results Briefing in April. It compares the video game hardware market shares in Japan, the U.S. and Europe during the three-month period of January to March.
In those three markets combined, Nintendo 3DS had become the platform with the largest share thanks to the huge sales figures in Japan. However, the device did not have a satisfactory presence yet in the U.S. and European markets. Therefore, as I mentioned in that presentation, our most important challenge for this year is to vitalize the Nintendo 3DS business in the Western markets.

This graph shows the market shares in April.
The market share of Nintendo 3DS has increased both in the U.S. and in Europe since highly anticipated titles for the platform, including “Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon,” have been released since March.
Although the U.S. NPD data for May 2013 has not been announced yet,

you can see that the market shares of Nintendo 3DS have further increased in Japan and Europe.

For your information, the launches of “Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon” and “Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity” in late March improved the situation for Nintendo 3DS in the U.S.
The successive releases of other much-anticipated titles since then have more than doubled total first-party software sales counting from April compared to last year. Thanks to the revitalized Nintendo 3DS software market, the sales pace of the hardware has also showed a year-on-year increase since April in spite of a sharp decrease in the size of the entire U.S. video game market.

In Europe the situation varies by country. This graph compares the hardware market shares in the seven European countries where Nintendo subsidiaries conduct direct sales. This graph shows data during the three-month period of January to March, which I showed in the Financial Results Briefing in April.
Nintendo 3DS had a certain presence in countries such as France, Belgium and Germany, but the sales in the UK, the biggest market in Europe, were lower than what they should have been.

Here is the data for April. The continual release of much-anticipated titles since March has greatly improved the situation.
Except for the UK and the Netherlands, Nintendo 3DS has become the platform with the largest share for five different countries in Europe. Also, Nintendo 3DS software has a good presence in the hit charts in each of these countries.

You can see from this graph for May that the market share of Nintendo 3DS has further increased. Nintendo 3DS software titles have shown a greater presence on the hit charts in each country.