Nintendo - Company History

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Financial history 1959–2026 — revenue, cost structure, balance sheet, cash flow and key ratios, year by year →

Founded 1889
Founder Yamauchi Fusajiro
Founding location 京都府京都市
Core business at founding Hand-made hanafuda playing cards
Listed 1962
President Furukawa Shuntaro President since 2018 (age 54, as of 2026)
Current priority New product development · Widening the customer base The transition to Switch 2 and enlarging the population that comes into contact with Nintendo IP
Founding
In September 1889 Yamauchi Fusajiro began manufacturing hanafuda cards in Shimogyo-ku, Kyoto. It began as the sideline of a merchant house that dealt in cement as Haiko Honten, in the third year after the manufacture and sale of hanafuda had been licensed. In the last years of Meiji the range widened to the Western-style playing cards brought in from abroad, and in 1933 the adopted son-in-law Yamauchi Sekiryo founded Yamauchi Nintendo & Co. and succeeded as the second-generation head. The family business was handed down through three generations, adopted sons-in-law included. Manufacture, though, stayed handwork for a long time, and even when the company took joint-stock form as Marufuku Co. in 1947 it was still only one of the many household workshops of Kyoto.
The Decision
What Nintendo competes on is not performance but whether people find a thing fun. Yamauchi Hiroshi, who inherited the family business at twenty-two in 1949, saw the ceiling on a single-product company and from 1961 diversified into taxis and instant food, only to withdraw from all of it by 1969. That unbroken run of defeats outside entertainment, which left nothing behind, fixed the company's field of business inside play. In 1983 it did not aim at a high-performance machine but put out the Family Computer, cheap to buy at $62 (¥14,800), and raised the home games market itself on the strength of fun. Since 2002, when the presidency passed to Iwata Satoru, who had come up through the development of games software, that standard has not changed.
Today
Everything the company does now rides on a single platform that merges the handheld and the home console. The Nintendo Switch of 2017 gathered development resources into one place and stopped eight straight years of falling revenue. In June 2025 the successor Nintendo Switch 2 was launched, inheriting that installed base. In the year to March 2026 consolidated revenue was $14.6B (¥2.31tn) and operating profit $2.3B (¥360bn), with Japan a little over two-tenths of the total. The IP management that began with the joint founding of The Pokemon Company in 1998 also supports the dedicated-hardware business, widening its characters into film content and theme parks as a strategy for enlarging the population that comes into contact with Nintendo IP.
Competition
The opponents Nintendo fought were always larger than it in capital. In the mid-1990s it broke with Sony over the leadership of a CD-ROM machine and developed the cartridge-based Nintendo 64 on its own. But the PlayStation, whose specifications were published openly, drew more than five hundred software houses, while shipments of the Nintendo 64 stopped at 1.16 million units in the three months after launch, and the leadership of the home console passed out of Nintendo's hands. Handhelds it held on to — Pocket Monsters, in which characters were traded over a link cable, turned the mature Game Boy back into a product that sold. The stance of competing not on performance but on ways of playing did not change even after that loss of leadership.

Timeline

1889–1965From hanafuda maker to a postwar monopoly in playing cards

  1. 1889Yamauchi Fusajiro begins making hanafuda cards in Kyoto
  2. 1933Yamauchi Sekiryo founds Yamauchi Nintendo & Co. as second-generation head
  3. 1947Marufuku Co. established, starting the postwar reorganisation
  4. 1949Yamauchi Hiroshi becomes president at twenty-two
  5. 1951Renamed Nintendo Kotai Co.
  6. 1953Mass production of Japan's first plastic playing cards
  7. 1957Bulk exports to South America begin
  8. 1959Exclusive domestic rights to Disney character cards; hanafuda manufacture mechanised
  9. 1960Entry into taxis and food; television commercials begin
  10. 1962Listed on the second section of the Osaka Stock Exchange
  11. 1963Renamed Nintendo Co.; domestic card share reaches about 80 per cent
  12. 1965Revenue and profit both fall as card sales stagnate

1966–2006Converging on play alone, and the home market the Famicom created

  1. 1966Internal decision to become an all-round indoor-games company
  2. 1969The last of the outside ventures is withdrawn
  3. 1973Laser Clay Shooting System launched for arcades
  4. 1975Leisure equipment sells poorly; excess stock cuts revenue and profit
  5. 1977Entry into video games and arcade games
  6. 1980Game & Watch launched; over 30 million sold
  7. 1983The Famicom launched at $62 (¥14,800); listed on the first section of the TSE
  8. 1986The Famicom becomes a social phenomenon
  9. 1990New subsidiaries established in Europe and the United States
  10. 1992Nintendo withdraws from CD-ROM development with Sony
  11. 1996Nintendo 64 launched; Pocket Monsters released for the Game Boy
  12. 1998Pokémon Center Co. co-founded with Game Freak and Creatures
  13. 2001GameCube home console launched
  14. 2002Yamauchi Hiroshi steps down; Iwata Satoru becomes president
  15. 2004Nintendo DS handheld launched
  16. 2006Wii home console launched

2007–2025The successor trough, and single-platform consolidation with the Switch

  1. 2009Consolidated revenue peaks at $19.7B (¥1.84tn)
  2. 2011The 3DS fails to repeat the DS; sales end at 75.94 million
  3. 2012First net loss; Wii U launched
  4. 20143DS and Wii U both struggle; net loss again
  5. 2015Capital and business alliance with DeNA; Iwata Satoru dies at fifty-five
  6. 2016Kimishima Tatsumi serves as president through fiscal 2016
  7. 2017Nintendo Switch launched; revenue bottoms at $4.4B (¥489bn)
  8. 2018Revenue doubles to $9.6B (¥1.06tn), ending eight years of decline
  9. 2020Animal Crossing: New Horizons meets pandemic demand
  10. 2022Cumulative Switch sales pass 100 million units
  11. 2025Nintendo Switch 2 launched on 5 June; 15 million sold by December

Founding Story

1889–1965From hanafuda maker to a postwar monopoly in playing cards

Nintendo spent its first six decades as a Kyoto card workshop, selling hanafuda and then Western playing cards through distribution borrowed from a tobacco house while the work itself stayed handmade. The twenty-two-year-old who inherited it in 1949 mechanised that craft and took roughly 80 per cent of the domestic market — and then discovered that the market itself had a ceiling.

The obsession with breaking out of a family workshop, inherited at twenty-two

In September 1889 Yamauchi Fusajiro (山内房治郎) began manufacturing hanafuda — Japanese flower playing cards — in Shimogyo-ku, Kyoto[1]. The Yamauchi family were merchants who ran Haiko Honten (灰孝本店), a cement dealership, and the cards started as a sideline[2]. The manufacture and sale of hanafuda had been licensed only in 1886[3], and demand for gaming implements that had lived in the shadow of gambling was just coming into the open. With the help of an old acquaintance, the tobacco king Murai Kichibei (村井吉兵衛), Fusajiro put his cards on the nationwide tobacco distribution routes of Murai Brothers & Co., widening his outlets at a stroke. In the last years of Meiji he also took up the manufacture of Western-style playing cards, and before the war those products spread widely both inside and outside Japan[4]. In 1933 the adopted son-in-law Yamauchi Sekiryo (山内積良) founded Yamauchi Nintendo & Co. and succeeded as the second-generation head[5], and in November 1947 Marufuku Co. was established[6], beginning the postwar reorganisation into joint-stock form. Making cards remained handwork that never really left the craft stage, and Kyoto was well suited to that hand manufacture[7].

In 1949 the second-generation president Yamauchi Sekiryo died suddenly at sixty-six[8]. His grandson Yamauchi Hiroshi (山内溥) took over as president at twenty-two, while still a student at Waseda University[9], and joined Nintendo in December of that year[10]. Yamauchi later recalled his state of mind on inheriting the company at that age: I was seized with a formless rage.[11]. On taking office he began by tidying up the corporate form: in September 1949 the company was renamed Marufuku Karuta Hanbai Co., and in March 1950 Nintendo Karuta Co.[12], after which it took over from Yamauchi Nintendo & Co. the manufacture of karuta cards including the Daitoryo (President) brand[13]. In July 1951 the name changed again, to Nintendo Kotai Co.[14] On the production side he avoided full-scale capital spending, holding back both plant extensions and hiring for increased output — a policy Yamauchi later named as the single biggest reason the company came through its crises[15].

The ceiling of the playing-card trade, seen from an 80 per cent share

In 1953 Nintendo began mass production of the first plastic playing cards made in Japan[16]. In July 1957 it committed to bulk exports to South America[17], putting its products outside the domestic market. In October 1959 it developed a board-laminating machine and an automatic cutter in quick succession, mechanising hanafuda manufacture[18] and converting a method that had depended on handwork into modern volume production. In the year to March 1962, sales by product were $827,778 (¥298m) for Western playing cards, $491,667 (¥177m) for karuta and hanafuda and $111,111 (¥40m) for everything else[19] — the mainstay had already shifted to Western cards. In the same year the playing-card plant had 156 employees and production capacity of $1M (¥370m), standing alongside the karuta plant with its 202 employees and $583,333 (¥210m).

In November 1959 Nintendo obtained exclusive domestic sales rights from Disney Productions for character playing cards[20], and from 1960 it opened up wholesaler and department-store routes across the country through television commercials, which it put in earnest from that year. Running a TV commercial to advertise something as trivial as playing cards was, at the time, utterly outside common sense, Yamauchi said of the period[21]. In January 1962 the shares were listed on the second section of the Osaka Stock Exchange and on the Kyoto Stock Exchange[22]; by about 1963 the domestic share of Western playing cards had reached roughly 80 per cent[23], and in 1964 the company was counted, as a firm that made money, among Kyoto's neat little companies[24]. In October 1963 the name was changed to Nintendo Co.[25], dropping the playing-card trade from the corporate name. Yet what Yamauchi had seen on a study visit to the United States in 1956 was that even the largest playing-card maker in America ran a business of limited size, and the ceiling on a single-product company showed up as the stagnation of card sales from 1964[26].

Read the full history in Japanese →

Notes

  1. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji 企業の歴史 : 明治百年, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  2. Bunshun Online, 17 February 2017, "Why was Nintendo able to succeed with hanafuda?"↩
  3. Bunshun Online, 17 February 2017, "Why was Nintendo able to succeed with hanafuda?"↩
  4. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji 企業の歴史 : 明治百年, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  5. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji 企業の歴史 : 明治百年, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  6. Nintendo, securities report for the 85th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  7. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji 企業の歴史 : 明治百年, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  8. Zaikai Kakeifu Taikan 財界家系譜大観, 1st edition, 1971↩
  9. Zaikai Kakeifu Taikan 財界家系譜大観, 1st edition, 1971↩
  10. Nikkei Business, 24 February 2003, editor-in-chief interview with Yamauchi Hiroshi, adviser to Nintendo↩
  11. Nintendo Shoho no Himitsu 任天堂商法の秘密, 1986↩
  12. Nintendo, securities report for the 85th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  13. Nintendo, securities report for the 85th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  14. Nintendo, securities report for the 85th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  15. Nikkei Business, 30 May 1983, "Ideas become hits when technology puts flesh on them"↩
  16. Nintendo, annual securities report↩
  17. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji 企業の歴史 : 明治百年, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  18. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji 企業の歴史 : 明治百年, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  19. Kabushiki Gaisha Nenkan 株式会社年鑑↩
  20. Nintendo, annual securities report↩
  21. Nikkei Business, 30 May 1983, "Ideas become hits when technology puts flesh on them"↩
  22. Nintendo, securities report for the 85th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  23. Nikkei Business, 30 May 1983, "Ideas become hits when technology puts flesh on them"↩
  24. Shukan Noda Keizai 週刊野田経済, July 1964↩
  25. Nintendo, securities report for the 85th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  26. Nikkei Business, 30 May 1983, "Ideas become hits when technology puts flesh on them"↩

References & sources

  1. Nintendo Co., Ltd. (annual securities reports), including the corporate-history section and the segment and results disclosures.
  2. Nintendo Shoho no Himitsu 1986, the source of Yamauchi Hiroshi's recollections of the 1949 succession and of the diversification years.
  3. Nikkei Business (Nikkei BP): 30 May 1983 (Yamauchi Hiroshi on surviving the toy market); 10 Dec 1984; 17 Mar 1986; 9 Oct 1995; 27 Jan 1997; 24 Jul 2000.
  4. Shukan Noda Keizai, Jul 1964, on Nintendo's two-track strategy (Noda Keizai Kenkyusho, ed.). NDL Digital Collections.
  5. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha (1968), the Nintendo entry.

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