After Animal Crossing, Pokemon is Key for Nintendo

September 1, 2013 Leave a comment

Aug 30, 2013

After Animal Crossing, Pokemon is Key for Nintendo

By Daisuke Wakabayashi

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A man sits by a huge poster of Pokemon characters in Tokyo, in this July file photo.

A lot is riding on Pikachu’s little yellow shoulders. With a growing number of consumers playing videogames on smartphones and tablet computers, Nintendo’s biggest weapon in enticing gamers to buy its hardware is to create appealing games that can’t be played anywhere else. Sequels of proven hit franchises like “Animal Crossing” are central to that strategy.  Perhaps no franchise is as important to the success of its portable game systems as the “Pokemon,” or Pocket Monsters, series, a long-running favorite among young children who collect and train cute-looking monsters for head-to-head battle.It’s been a staple Nintendo game since the first Pokemon debuted in 1996. It’s evolved into a massive entertainment powerhouse featuring trading cards, comic books and a wide range of merchandise. The face of that franchise is none other than Pikachu, a short, chubby pocket monster whose occasional discharges of electricity belie his cute demeanor.

Nintendo is counting on Pokemon to work its magic again, driving customers to its portable game machines. The company is planning to release “Pokemon X” and “Pokemon Y” worldwide as a pair of games on Oct. 12.

In a sign of how much is riding on Pokemon, Nintendo is introducing a discounted handheld game machine on the same day as the game’s launch. The new device will be called 2DS, a cousin of the existing 3DS device. It plays the same games as the 3DS but it is missing the feature to display 3-D images. Nintendo said it will start selling the 2DS in North America and Europe on Oct.12 for $130 – nearly 25% cheaper than the 3DS. 

Historically, demand for Nintendo’s portable game machines starts to take off once the Pokemon games hit the market. With the Nintendo DS, sales started to spike after the company released “Pokemon Diamond Version” and “Pokemon Pearl Version.” Another positive factor in the DS’s sales improvement was the introduction of a slimmer, lighter DS.

Pokemon Diamond/Pearl sold about 18 million units for the DS, making it the fifth most popular game for the platform. Two other Pokemon titles are also in the top 10 of best-selling DS games.

Can Pikachu work his magic again?

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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