By Sam Nussey
TOKYO (Reuters) -Japan's Nintendo said on Tuesday it plans to make an announcement about the successor to its long-lasting Switch console during the financial year ending March 2025.
Nintendo has extended the lifecycle of the Switch device with hit titles such as "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom", with the market focused on the prospects for a smooth transition to next-generation hardware.
The Kyoto-based gaming company said it expects to sell 13.5 million Switch units in the current financial year as it tries to squeeze further sales from the aging device.
Nintendo did not offer further details on new hardware, saying that there would be no disclosure at its Nintendo Direct presentation in June.
"A lot of users will now hold off buying the current Switch as they know that the new model will come out some time in 2025," said Serkan Toto, founder of the Kantan Games consultancy.
Nintendo last year sold 15.7 million units of the hybrid home-portable device, which launched in March 2017. Nintendo lifted its full-year forecast to 15.5 million units in February.
The company has made incremental changes to its Switch devices, with sales of the OLED model growing year-on-year even as broader hardware sales continued their annual decline.
Nintendo expects operating profit to fall this year by around a quarter to 400 billion yen ($2.6 billion).
The company is seen as having a thin pipeline as it holds back heavy-hitting titles for the successor device with announced titles including "Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door" later this month and "Luigi's Mansion 2" in June.
Nintendo expects to sell 165 million software units this year, which would be a 17% decline on the year earlier.
"The development of games has become more sophisticated, long term and complex," Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa said when asked how the market has changed since the Switch launched.
In the year ended March operating profit grew 4.9% to 528.9 billion yen.
Nintendo's shares closed up 2.4% ahead of earnings and are up 5.4% this year after a recent sell-off.
"Fiscal 2026 is a very late launch window for new hardware," said Toto.
($1 = 154.2700 yen)
(Reporting by Sam Nussey; Editing by Christopher Cushing, Tom Hogue and Louise Heavens)
