Nintendo sells 2.74 million Switch consoles, trims quarterly losses

Nintendo Co.'s Switch, a new hybrid game machine that works as both a console and a tablet, is selling well, helping the Kyoto-based company behind the Super Mario and Pokemon franchises trim its quarterly losses.

This Thursday Nintendo said it has sold 2.74 million Switch machines and 5.46 million units of Switch software since sales began in March. It had expected to sell two million Switch machines by the end of March.

The company anticipates selling another 10 million Switch machines in the fiscal year that ends in March 2018.

The company's January-March loss was 394 million yen, improved from a 24 billion yen loss a year earlier. Quarterly sales jumped to nearly 178 billion yen from 79 billion yen.

Nintendo has lagged amid competition from smartphones, and also at times has been slammed by an unfavourable exchange rate. A strong yen cheapens the value of overseas earnings of Japanese exporters like Nintendo.

In the fiscal year that ended in March, Nintendo's profit jumped more than six times from the previous fiscal year to 102.6 billion yen ($1.26 billion), up from 16.5 billion yen.