Wii vastly boosts Nintendo's profit

news via forbes

Hong Kong -

Nintendo reported Friday that sales of its new Wii videogame platform have pushed the company's earnings up 43% in the last year.

The results helped Kyoto, Japan-based Nintendo (other-otc: NTDOY - news - people ) hit its 52-week high by closing at 34,150 yen ($281.14) on Friday. Nintendo's shares have climbed 113% in the last year.

Nintendo’s net income topped 131.92 billion yen ($1.1 billion) for the nine months through December 2006, up from 92.19 billion yen ($764.6 million) in 2005, beating a 12-month profit forecast of 120 billion yen ($996 million) for this year.

Much of that increase came from the Wii, the relatively low-priced game machine that Nintendo introduced last fall to compete with Sony's (nyse: SNE - news - people ) PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) Xbox 360.

Nintendo’s Wii has outperformed Sony's machine, which debuted at the same time. According to research house NPD Group, Nintendo shipped 1.1 million Wii consoles to the U.S. in November and December, 60% more than shipments of PlayStation 3. In Japan, Nintendo sold nearly 990,000 units in December, more than twice PlayStation3’s sales in two months, according to Tokyo research firm Enterbrain.

Microsoft, meanwhile, lowered its forecast for its Xbox 360 machines, which it began selling at the end of 2005. The company had previously predicted it would sell 13 million to 15 million machines by the end of June. But yesterday Microsoft predicted it would likely sell 12 million consoles by that date.