Mario poses at the “SUPER NINTENDO WORLD” welcome celebration at Universal Studios Hollywood on February 16, 2023 in Universal City, California.
Rodin Eckenroth | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
Nintendo on Tuesday cut forecast for Switch sales for its fiscal year ending March 2025 as demand wanes for its ageing console.
The Japanese gaming giant said it now expects to sell 12.5 million units of the Switch over the course of the period. That’s down from a previous forecast of 13.5 million units.
Nintendo has been contending with fading demand for its flagship Switch console, which is now more than seven years old.
Investors are waiting for news surrounding a successor to the Switch, which they hope will re-energize Nintendo’s gaming business. In the past, the company said that the Switch successor will be announced in its current fiscal year, which ends in March 2025.
Nintendo also cut full fiscal year forecasts for sales and operating profit. The company said it now expects sales of 1.28 trillion yen versus a previous forecast of 1.35 trillion yen. The operating profit outlook for the period was slashed from 400 billion yen to 360 billion yen.
Here’s how Nintendo did in its fiscal second quarter ended Sept. 30 versus LSEG estimates:
Revenue: 276.7 billion Japanese yen ($1.8 billion), compared with 273.34 billion yen expected.
Net profit: 27.7 billion yen, versus 48.06 billion yen expected.
Revenue fell 17% year-on-year. Net profit plunged just over 69% versus the same period last year.
Super Mario, Zelda boost fading
The Switch is Nintendo’s second best-selling console in history, behind the Nintendo DS. Despite the recent fall in sales, Nintendo has prolonged the console’s appeal for an extended period of time since its launch in 2017 by relying on its recognizable characters.
In its last fiscal year, Nintendo managed to reinvigorate sales of the Switch thanks to the the success of the “Super Mario Bros. Movie” and the highly anticipated release of the “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” game, which underscored the appeal of its iconic characters.
But that effect is fading.
On Tuesday, Nintendo noted the boost that the company received in the first half of its last fiscal year, but said “there were no such special factors in the first half of this fiscal year, and with Nintendo Switch now in its eighth year since launch, unit sales of both hardware and software decreased significantly year-on-year.”
Sales of the Switch totaled 4.72 units in the six months ended Sept. 30, compared with 6.84 million units in the same period of last year.
In the face of falling sales, Nintendo has tried to license out its intellectual property for use everywhere, from movies to theme parks. A new Super Mario movie is slated for release in 2026.
MongoDB shares sank 16% in extended trading on Wednesday after the database software maker issued disappointing guidance.
Here’s how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus:
Earnings per share: $1.28 adjusted vs. 66 cents expected
Revenue: $548.4 million vs. $519.6 million expected
Revenue increased about 20% from a year ago in the quarter that ended on Jan. 31, according to a statement. The company generated $15.8 million in net income, or 19 cents per share, which factors in stock-based compensation. In the same quarter a year ago, MongoDB had registered a net loss of $55.5 million, or 77 cents per share.
MongoDB added 1,900 customers in the quarter, bringing the total to 54,500. But the company ended the quarter with about $360 million in deferred revenue, below the StreetAccount consensus of $370.4 million.
MongoDB is seeing slower growth than it had hoped for in new applications using its Atlas cloud-based database service, Srdjan Tanjga, MongoDB’s interim finance chief, said on a conference call with analysts. Meanwhile, MongoDB is hiring rapidly to pursue more deals with large companies, while pulling back on mid-sized businesses, Tanjga said.
During the quarter, MongoDB acquired artificial intelligence startup Voyage for an undisclosed sum.
“We want to capitalize on a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” CEO Dev Ittycheria said.
For the fiscal first quarter, MongoDB called for 63 cents to 67 cents in adjusted earnings per share on $524 million to $529 million in revenue. Analysts surveyed by LSEG had expected 62 cents of per-share earnings and revenue of $526.8 million.
MongoDB said it expects adjusted earnings per share of $2.44 to $2.62 and revenue of $2.24 billion to $2.28 billion for fiscal 2026. That implies 12.7% revenue growth, which would be the slowest rate at least since the company went public in 2017. Analysts were anticipating $3.34 per share of earnings and $2.32 billion in revenue.
Prior to Wednesday’s after-hours move, MongoDB shares were up 13%, while the S&P 500 was down about 1%.
Content aggregator Digg is making a comeback with the help of an unlikely partner: Reddit co-founder and rival Alexis Ohanian.
Ohanian and Digg founder Kevin Rose acquired the platform for an undisclosed sum. The deal is backed by venture capital firms True Ventures, where Rose is a partner, and Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six. The partnership was announced Wednesday in a video post to the company’s X account in which Rose called the partnership a “team-up he would have never imagined 20 years ago.”
Digg was founded in 2004 and rose to prominence as a major outlet for trending news because it allowed users to rate stories. Rose made what became an infamously goofy appearance on the cover of Businessweek in 2006 as the kid who “made $60 million in 18 months.”
The company said in a release that it aims to differentiate itself in the social media market by “focusing on AI innovations designed to enhance the user experience and build a human-centered alternative.” Digg said it will also create a platform that “prioritizes transparency, rewards human effort, and fosters enriching discussions.”
Ohanian also teased the collaboration, telling X followers on Wednesday that he was “working on something new… but also old… but also very new” and is “excited” to be partnering with Rose.
At its peak in 2008, Digg was reportedly valued at about $160 million. But the rise of Facebook and other social sites caused traffic to Digg to plummet. Meanwhile, Reddit, which was founded a year after Digg by Ohanian and current CEO Steve Huffman, emerged as a direct rival to Digg by forming communities around types of content and letting users similarly rate news stories.
In 2012, Digg’s brand and website were acquired by tech incubator Betaworks for about $500,000.
Reddit has continued its ascent, reporting nearly 102 million daily active users at the end of the fourth quarter. The site gained widespread attention when it became the center of the 2020 meme stock craze as retail traders inflicted huge pain on hedge funds shorting stocks using a subreddit known as Wallstreetbets.
Reddit went public on the New York Stock Exchange last March at $34 a share and has seen its stock nearly quintuple. Shares are up about 1% year to date and added 4% during Wednesday’s session.
Ohanian has moved on to other projects since he stepped down from Reddit’s board in 2020. He’s currently partnering with billionaire Frank McCourt in a bid for TikTok after President Donald Trump extended the initial deadline for the company’s Chinese-parent ByteDance to sell the social media platform or face a ban.
Rose said in a post on X that he and Ohanian “dreamed up features that weren’t even possible with yesterday’s tech.”
“The new @digg brings some great nostalgia, but we’re not here to just rebuild the past or clone a competitor,” he wrote.
The cybersecurity software provider said it expects fiscal first-quarter earnings to range between 64 cents and 66 cents per share, versus the average Factset estimate of 95 cents. CrowdStrike is projecting earnings for the year to range between $3.33 and $3.45 per share, excluding items. That fell short $4.42 expected by analysts polled by LSEG.
For the fiscal fourth quarter, CrowdStrike posted a net loss of $92.3 billion, or 37 cents per share, versus net income of $53.7 million, or 22 cents per share, in the year-ago period. The company also reported $21 million in costs from incident-related expenses and $49.9 million of tax expenses connected to acquisitions.
The company also said it anticipates another $73 million in expenses for the first quarter resulting from its July update that spurred a global information technology outage, grounded flights and disrupted businesses. CrowdStrike projects an additional $43 million in costs due to some deal packages offered in its wake.
The outage has also weighed on free cash flow margins, which CrowdStrike said on a conference call with analysts Tuesday it expects to return to 30% or more in fiscal 2027.
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Many on Wall Street expect headwinds from the July issue to start abating in the new fiscal year, with Bernstein’s Peter Weed expecting a pick up in CrowdStrike net retention rate in the new fiscal year.
“Although FY26 guidance marked a conservative start to the year, in our view, we expect management is setting the stage for a return to a beat-and-raise cadence we saw before the outage,” wrote JPMorgan’s Brian Essex.
CrowdStrike’s disappointing guidance offset better-than-expected fiscal fourth-quarter results. The company posted adjusted earnings of $1.03 per share on $1.06 billion in revenue and said that revenue grew 25% from a year ago.
Founder and CEO George Kurtz called the company a “comeback story” on the conference call.
“I’m extremely proud of the engagement we’ve had with customers, partners, prospects in the market navigating a year that tested CrowdStrike,” he said. “Q4 showcases the fruits of our labors, giving me strong conviction in our AI-native, single platform, excellent execution, and accelerating market opportunity.”