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Nintendo in profit on each Wii sold
Its rivals aren't
Every Wii nets Nintendo $6, but the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 don’t produce any profit for Sony and Microsoft, a market analyst has claimed.
David Gibson from Macquarie Securities said in a Forbes magazine report that – unlike its competitors – Nintendo has “figured out how to make money from its console sales”.
That's console hardware sales - console makers generally do very nicely, thank you, out of the software.
The Japanese games giant is quids on the hardware, Gibson claimed, because it buys in inexpensive components instead of making them in-house.
If Gibson’s estimate is correct, then Nintendo has made a massive $210m (£141m/€166m) from Wii sales so far, given that the firm recently announced global sales in the region of 35m units.
Microsoft has only broken even on its 25m or so Xbox 360 shipments, while Sony’s actually lost money despite selling about 17m PS3s, the report added.