Speaking in a Japanese
Nikkei interview (paywall), Shuntaro Furukawa claimed that using the company’s over ¥1 trillion ($9.45 billion) war chest to simply expand its development resources would not be prudent.
While Nintendo
“will make investments if necessary”, Furukawa said its approach to M&A is based on whether potential targets can “improve the value of entertainment that Nintendo provides”.
“This is a partner that we have been working with for many years to develop various software, and we decided that we could improve the quality and speed of development by making it a subsidiary and working together,” Furukawa told Nikkei.
“We are not just blindly acquiring companies because we want development resources. We don’t think that simply expanding the scale of our business will really improve the value of the entertainment that Nintendo provides.”
Ampere Analysis analyst Piers Harding-Rolls said the buyout represented Nintendo’s first acquisition since its 2007 takeover of Xenoblade developer
Monolith Soft.
“There is a backdrop of increased M&A in games, but this doesn’t signify a change in Nintendo’s strategy, more a response to NLG seeking a buyer,” he
wrote in January.
Elsewhere in the Nikkei interview, Furukawa discussed
Nintendo’s approach to developing and launching new gaming hardware, which he said must be able to offer consumers “new forms of entertainment”.
Switch had shipped almost 80 million consoles worldwide as of December 31, 2020, according to Nintendo.
However, Furukawa said he believed that, “no matter what kind of hit product you have, in the entertainment business, there will always be a point where people get tired of it.
Nintendo isn’t interested in ‘just blindly acquiring companies’, says president | VGC
Furukawa believes that increasing the size of Nintendo's teams won'