Attendees walk past an advertising board during the Nintendo Switch 2 Experience at the ExCeL London international exhibition and convention centre in London, Britain, April 11, 2025.
Isabel Infantes | Reuters
Nintendo said Thursday that it expects to sell 15 million units of its new Switch 2 console in the fiscal year ending March 2026.
It is the first forecast for sales from the Japanese gaming giant since it announced the successor to its successful Switch device, which is due to go on sale in June.
Nintendo also reported results for its fiscal fourth quarter and full year. Here’s how Nintendo did in its fiscal fourth quarter ended Mar. 31 versus LSEG estimates:
Revenue: 208.7 billion Japanese yen ($1.45 billion), compared with 216.16 billion yen expected.
Net profit: 41.6 billion yen, versus 33.91 billion yen expected.
Revenue fell 24.7% in the fourth quarter compared to the same period a year earlier, while profit plunged nearly 50%. This was largely expected as Nintendo fans await the Switch 2 and hold off on buying the current console.
Earlier this year Nintendo slashed its forecast for sales of the Switch to 11 million units for the year ended Mar. 31. Nintendo on Thursday said it sold 10.8 million units of the Switch in the year, just shy of its own forecast and down 31% year-on-year.
Tariffs in focus
Investors are also focused on Nintendo’s forecast for the fiscal year. The company expects net sales of 1.9 trillion yen, a 63% year-on-year rise but just short of LSEG estimates of 2 trillion yen. It expects net profit to jump 7.6% to 300 billion yen, below LSEG estimates of 388.8 billion yen.
However, Nintendo noted that all of its forecasts are based on U.S. tariff rates effective Apr. 10 — following a pause in U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs for many countries.
Nintendo in April delayed pre-orders for the Switch 2 in the U.S. after the initial announcement of Trump’s sweeping tariffs on countries around the world. Nintendo’s consoles are manufactured in Vietnam, which faces duties of 46% once the pause lifts.
Nintendo’s President Shuntaro Furukawa said on Thursday that if additional tariffs are imposed and prices of its goods need to be adjusted, demand in the U.S. may decrease, Reuters reported. Duties could hit profit to the tune of tens of billions of yen, Furukawa added, according to the report.
Switch 2 fuels stock rally
Investors are now focused on how the successor to the console, the Switch 2, will perform following its launch. The Switch 2 will start at $449.99 in the U.S. and has improved features compared with its predecessor.
As well as the 15 million unit sales forecast for the fiscal year ended March 2026, Nintendo said it expects to sell 45 million units of software during that same time period.
Games are important for the success of any console and Nintendo said the Switch 2 will launch with two titles — “Mario Kart World” and “Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour.” There will also be Switch 2 versions of existing games such as “Zelda: Breath of the Wild.” Nintendo is leaning on its popular characters such as Mario and Zelda to boost the appeal of the Switch 2.
Nintendo first launched the original Switch in 2017 and it has become the Japanese gaming giant’s second-best-selling console ever with over 150 million units sold. The firm managed to extend the life of the hardware thanks to hit games involving characters like Super Mario, franchises such as Pokemon and the expansion of its intellectual property into films.
Investors are hopeful the company can continue to ride its wave of popularity with shares up around 30% this year and 64% over the past 12 months.
Brad Gerstner, Altimeter Founder and CEO, speaks at the Delivering Alpha conference in New York City on Sept. 28, 2023.
Adam Jeffery | CNBC
Investor Brad Gerstner cautioned Monday that OpenAI‘s deals with Nvidia and AMD are purely announcements, not deployments.
“Now we will see what gets delivered,” the Altimeter Capital founder told CNBC. “Ultimately, the best chips will win.”
OpenAI’s megadeal with AMD and its relentless push to expand artificial intelligence capabilities underscores the intensifying competitive landscape.
Gerstner said the deals provide “more evidence that the world will remain compute-constrained despite best efforts to bring massive supply online.”
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Experts say it’s also another validation of the AI arms race heating up, with AI a key element in the geopolitical race between the U.S. and China.
OpenAI’s Chinese rival DeepSeek sent shockwaves last year when it claimed to have a lower-cost AI model than its U.S. peer. And Deepseek has continued to innovate, delivering new open-sourced models using domestically made AI chips.
Last week, the U.S. government issued a report warning of DeepSeek’s national security concerns, Axios reported.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation said DeepSeek provides Chinese Communist Party views more frequently than U.S. models, according to Axios.
OpenAI’s partnership with AMD is raising hopes that it is taking the right steps to increase production and build more complex AI models.
“What we’re really seeing is a world where there’s going to be absolute compute scarcity, because there’s going to be so much demand for AI services, and not just from OpenAI, really from the whole ecosystem,” OpenAI President told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” Monday. “And so that’s why it’s just so important for this whole industry to come together.”
The AppLovin logo arranged on a smartphone in New York, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images
AppLovin shares plummeted on Monday after Bloomberg reported that the SEC has been probing the mobile advertising company over its data-collection practices.
The agency has been looking into whether the company violated agreements on pushing targeted ads to consumers, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The report said that the SEC is responding to a whistleblower complained filed this year along with multiple short-seller reports, and added that neither the company nor its officials have been accused of wrongdoing.
An AppLovin spokesperson said the company doesn’t typically comment on the “existence or non-existence” of regulatory matters.
“That said, as a global public company, we regularly engage with regulators and if we get inquiries we address them in the ordinary course,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Material developments, if any, would be disclosed through the appropriate public channels.”
The stock dropped 14% in regular trading after the report, which landed shortly before market close. It fell another 5% in extended trading.
AppLovin’s stock has been on a tear, jumping about 80% this year after soaring more than 700% in 2024. The surge has been driven by the company’s artificial intelligence technology that’s allowed it to provide better ad targeting capabilities to brands.
Last month, AppLovin was added to the S&P 500, replacing MarketAxess Holdings, at the same time that Robinhood joined the index in place of Caesars Entertainment.
AppLovin made the move into the benchmark despite a short-seller’s effort to keep it out.
In March, Fuzzy Panda Research advised the committee for the large-cap U.S. index to keep AppLovin from becoming a constituent. AppLovin shares dropped 15% in December, when the committee picked Workday to join the S&P 500.
Three notable short-seller firms, including Fuzzy Panda, have slammed AppLovin of late. The latest was Muddy Waters Research, which in March said the company’s ad tactics “systematically” violate app stores’ terms of service by “impermissibly extracting proprietary IDs from Meta, Snap, TikTok, Reddit, Google, and others.” In so doing, AppLovin is funneling targeted ads to users without their consent, Muddy Waters said.
Fuzzy Panda and Culper Research put out reports the prior month, taking aim at AppLovin’s AXON software, which drove its earnings growth and stock surge. The shares dropped 12% on Feb. 26, the day of the short reports.
After those reports were published, AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi wrote a blog post, defending his company’s technology and practices, and taking aim at the short sellers trying to profit from AppLovin’s decline.
Figma signage appears at the New York Stock Exchange in New York as the company prepares for its shares to begin trading on July 31, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Figma shares jumped 7% on Monday after the design software vendor’s technology was promoted by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an onstage demo at his company’s annual DevDay conference in San Francisco.
Altman discussed Figma’s integration into ChatGPT, which has more than 800 million monthly users. He showed how third-party applications could plug in with OpenAI’s Apps SDK, or software development framework.
“When someone’s using ChatGPT, you’ll be able to find an app by asking for it by name,” Altman said. “For example, you could sketch out a product flow for ChatGPT and then say, Figma, turn this sketch into a workable diagram. The Figma app will take over respond and complete the action.”
In addition to asking for Figma’s help by name in ChatGPT, the assistant can also suggest Figma when it’s relevant, Figma product manager Luke Zhang said in a blog post.
The rally for Figma, at its high point, was the steepest since the day of the company’s public market debut on the New York Stock Exchange in July.
Figma has been ramping up its own tools for working on app and website designs using generative AI models from OpenAI and other providers.
Subscribers to products that connect to the Apps SDK will be able to log in without leaving their ChatGPT conversations, Altman said. He said people working on products in Figma can also launch the FigJam tool to keep working on development ideas. Apps SDK is based on the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that OpenAI rival Anthropic introduced last year.
Software developers will be able to submit apps for review later in 2025, Altman said.
Over time, OpenAI will offer many ways to generate revenue through third-party integrations, Altman said. Last week, OpenAI announced a feature allowing people to buy products listed on Etsy through ChatGPT.