If I was Iwata I'd be driving that stock price down as far as I could so I could buy it all back. Can someone with more financial knowledge than me explain what the advantages/disadvantages would be to Nintendo to remain a publicly listed company?
If the investors basically got their way, Nintendo would pretty much stop making hardware and focus on mobile games. Yet the numbers just don't support it. Obviously Nintendo had a rough last financial year, revenue was down 29% to $12.1 billion US.
And yet, revenue from all major app stores in 2011 is expected to be around $4 billion US. Obviously it's still growing, with them expecting it to be $8 billion US in 2014:
http://www.isuppli.com/media-resear...-app-stores-to-rise-77-7-percent-in-2011.aspx
But that just says to me - Nintendo, in a down year, brought in three times the
entire revenue from all major mobile app stores.
The economics just don't stand up for me. I definitely don't think Nintendo just sit around and do nothing - I'd cut $10 off the price of 3DS software for one, but this investor push for a whole sale move to mobile platforms just seems like a disaster waiting to happen.
But then again, gotta keep hitting those quarterly growth figures.