Nintendo Company Ltd

Nintendo Co. was the big winner in the video-game console race in 2007, with sold-out sales of its Wii machine helping to send industry revenue soaring 43% to $17.9 billion last year in the U.S., according to a report released Thursday. Sony Corp., once the reigning champion with its PlayStation brand, came in last place out of the three major makers.

Nintendo Co.'s sales are speeding along faster than a getaway car, shrugging off economic woes as if they were bugs on the windshield. Its Wii video game console continues to be sold out in many stores. Sales of its DS hand-held console remain hot despite its being a 4-year-old product, ancient by game-technology standards.

Japan's Nintendo Co. raised its profit outlook by 20% for its current fiscal year because of upbeat sales worldwide of its portable game player Nintendo DS. The company raised its profit forecast to 120 billion yen ($1 billion) for its fiscal year ending in March from an earlier estimate of 100 billion yen. Nintendo also scored an unexpected success with its new Wii gaming system.

Booming year-end sales of the wand-wielding Wii game console sent profit at Nintendo Co. soaring 43% for the nine months ended in December, the Japanese manufacturer of Pokemon and Super Mario games said Thursday. Nintendo, which also makes GameBoy Advance and Nintendo DS hand-held consoles, recorded profit of 131.9 billion yen ($1.1 billion) in the first nine months of the fiscal year, up dramatically from 92.2 billion yen the same period a year earlier.

Japanese video game maker Nintendo Co. raised its sales and profit forecasts for the fourth time for the fiscal year that just ended, thanks to robust demand for its DS hand-held games. Nintendo said sales totaled about 966 billion yen ($8.1 billion) for the year that ended March 31, up from its previous forecast of 900 billion yen.

As it raced past rivals to become the hottest new video-game console, some analysts predicted that Nintendo Co.'s Wii was little more than a fad. Try telling that to Geoff Allen, who hasn't grown sick of playing the Wii after almost five months. He, his wife and his father all are hooked on "Wii Sports." "Within minutes, I can have fun," said Allen, a 36-year-old technology entrepreneur from Potomac Falls, Va.

Surging sales of Nintendo Co.'s Wii and DS video games lifted the company's quarterly profit fivefold, prompting the Japanese game maker to raise its annual earnings forecast 40%. Nintendo posted net income of 80.25 billion yen ($667 million) for the April-June period, up from 15.55 billion yen a year earlier. Sales more than doubled to 340.44 billion yen from 130.91 billion yen the previous year, powered by brisk sales of Nintendo's hand-held DS machine and its wand-wielding Wii console.

Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 outsold Nintendo Co.'s Wii for the first time this year in September as surging demand for the software maker's "Halo 3" title helped lift console sales. U.S. retailers sold 527,800 Xbox 360s, topping the Wii's 501,000, according to a report Thursday from research firm NPD Group Inc. Total hardware sales rose 124%. "Halo 3," made exclusively for the Xbox, was the top-selling video game for the month with 3.3 million copies sold, NPD said. The game, released Sept.

Wii're all sold out. Legions of shoppers are getting the message nearly everywhere they look for Nintendo Co.'s video game console. Even though it ramped up production capacity twice this year, Nintendo isn't meeting demand for the Wii, which has been on the market for more than a year and is, somehow, this season's hottest hard-to-find gift. Nintendo executives said the Japanese company had thought its production schedule -- about 1.8 million consoles a month -- would be sufficient.

Just what kids want under the Christmas tree this year: a rain check. Nintendo Co. said Friday that it wouldn't be able to make enough of its fast-selling Wii video game consoles to keep store shelves stocked during the holidays. So the company plans to issue tens of thousands of vouchers to customers who come up empty-handed. The "Wii Certificates" program could help Nintendo defuse criticism over Wii shortages for a second straight holiday season and stem defections to rival consoles.