Shuntaro Furukawa Is Nintendo’s New President

After releasing of the Nintendo Switch, the company had sold more Switch consoles in the first nine months than Wii U consoles were sold in their entire lifetime.

To make that massive surge in profits, Nintendo flogged 17.79 million Switches since its launch. That’s four million units more than the Wii U console sold in five years, and almost double the 10 million units of the Switch Nintendo initially planned to ship in the last year.

Nintendo’s Investor Report has just come out and within it are some great bits of news and information. With the success of the Switch, now is pretty much a flawless time to do just that, it seems. Shuntaro Furukawa, 46, a senior executive, is taking over as president from Tatsumi Kimishima.

Two hackers who go by the names fail0verflow and Kate Temik have delivered exploits for the Nintendo Switch, fully documenting the details online.

Furukawa will be only the sixth Nintendo president in the company’s history, which is quite remarkable considering the shuffling hierarchies of most big businesses. If that holds true, there will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 38 million Switch sales by next March.

With the Nintendo Switch launching just before the end of the 2016/17 financial year, the console saw a total of 15.05 sales within the 2017/18 financial year which is incredibly impressive. Satoru Iwata, who introduced the blockbuster Wii, became president in 2002 when he was 42 and ran the company until his death three years ago. Though The Pokemon Company is not owned outright by Nintendo – they share a roughly 33% stake with Game Freak and Creatures – it will be interesting to see how Furukawa’s tenure as president may bring Pokemon even more tightly into Nintendo’s bosom (gross).

Meanwhile, the Nintendo 3DS continued to perform strongly with 6.4 million sold, beating out the 5.28 million SNES Classic Edition retro consoles bought during the course of the reporting year.

Bloomberg reports that Furukawa said he hopes to balance Nintendo’s traditions of originality and flexibility. The revenue increased 116 percent to 1.06 trillion yen ($9.66 billion). Nintendo generated 178 billion yen ($1.62 billion) in operating profit for the year.