The firm slashed its expected group net profit by 17.5 percent to 66 billion yen (550 million dollars) with its recurring profit seen 13.6 percent below previous expectations at 95 billion yen.

Its sales are expected to decline 16.7 percent to 500 billion yen.

"The downward revision was due to our weaker sales of Gamecube and its related game software," said a Nintendo spokesman.

"Our sales lagged behind PlayStation 2 because they had several best-selling pieces of software. If you have popular software, sales of hardware automatically go up," the spokesman said.

Nintendo had earlier projected it would sell 10 million units of Gamecube consoles worldwide in the financial year to March but actual sales only totalled 5.6 million.

It had also planned to sell 55 million units of game software but sold 44.5 million units during the period.

SPACE.WIRE