About the time when we could see the new systems appearing, this has been said in May's Investor Briefing.
This is what has been discussed back in January
And this is what Iwata said in May about it.
In your presentation, you made it clear that in this fiscal year Nintendo would prioritize restoration of the balance of revenue and expenses. My question deals with the companys mid-term prospects. I would like Mr. Iwata to tell us his current thoughts on what he would like the following two terms (the fiscal year ending March 2016 and the fiscal year ending March 2017) to mean for the company. Given that Nintendo already made a significant devaluation of inventory in the previous fiscal year, I suppose you are envisioning that the financial performance of the company is set to recover by some extent this fiscal year, but what are the key factors that will drive the business from the next fiscal year? Or, do you think that investment will expand yet again from the new businesses in and after the next fiscal year? Please tell us how you would expect the companys financial performance to change from the next fiscal year.
Iwata:
With regard to this fiscal year, I feel that it is essential for us to restore the balance of revenue and expenses that has been lost temporarily in order to gain trust in the financial markets. On the other hand, while it is difficult to talk about the next two fiscal years using concrete figures, I feel that in the next fiscal year we will be able to be more specific about the kinds of mid-term projects that we discussed at the Corporate Management Policy Briefing in January, and in fact, we will even start to offer some of them to the public. In the following fiscal year, I expect some of these measures to start serving as a source of profits for the company. In this sense, instead of seeing a great and sudden recovery in our profitability in the next fiscal year, I am rather expecting to be able to report Nintendo-like profits from around the following fiscal year.
The company has set multiple measures for its mid-term future, but I think that sometimes it is necessary to make a big investment while maintaining a sound revenue-expenses balance. From this perspective, I would like to know whether you have set any priorities.
Iwata:
[...]
Also, regarding what I mentioned at the Corporate Management Policy Briefing in January about our efforts to go into a new business area, namely our platform business that seeks to enrich peoples QOL (Quality of Life) in enjoyable ways, I would like to talk more specifically about the kind of business we have in mind within this year, and the current time frame we are working on puts the actual deployment of the initiative in the next fiscal year, with contributions to our profitability to follow in the following fiscal year.
Moreover, I feel that we will be able to further stimulate our platform business by taking advantage of smart devices, and I think that we will be able to provide detailed information on this as well as some concrete results between the current and the next fiscal years.
Also, the idea I mentioned about redefining the definition of video game platforms will also require approximately two years.
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/library/events/140508qa/index.html
So, the two main things coming from both answers:
- some of the mid-to-long-term projects will become more clear in the next FY, to the point they'll be offered to the public.
- the redefinition of systems will require approximately two years
Let's see the goals discussed at the January Briefing:
We know next FY will be when QOL launches (more precisely, during next FY and withing 2015, so between April 1st 2015 and December 31st 2015).
Using smart devices will be seen in the current and next FYs, and we already started seeing this with Mario Kart TV
amiibos are using their IPs in a different way, and they're coming this Holiday, so this FY.
Since they talked about some of the goals becoming offerable to the public in the next FY (between April 1st 2015 and March 31st 2016), and QOL is one of them, what else are we going to see in the next Fiscal Year? I suppose seeing the first console under the new guidelines (console being more like brothers, etc.etc.) could be among them. Especially if we combine that with how Iwata said it'll be about two years before we see the redefinition. Since that was said in May, around 2 years and being out in the FY ending March 2016 can perfectly match under the theory that next handheld releases between January and March 2016, which would be almost two years from May, while Holiday 2016 would be 2 years and 6-7 months since the statement.