Despite previous claims about an extremely successful holiday seasons in the key North American market, Nintendo has lowered its projections for the fiscal year 2003/2004 due to continued weak demand in Japan. While the Kyoto-based company had hoped to sell six million GameCube and 20 million GameBoy Advance units worldwide by March 31st, it might ship only five million and 18 million units respectively. Nonetheless, software sales remained on a high level, with GameBoy Advance software sales during the first nine months having already exceeded the target set for the entire fiscal year (61.5 million compared to 60 million units). According to the revised estimates, Nintendo now expects a net profit of 54 billion yen ($509.82 million US), compared to earlier estimates speaking of 60 billion yen ($566.47 million US). Accordingly, the sales outlook was slashed by 40 billion yen ($377.64 million US) to 510 billion yen ($4.82 billion US).

• GameSpot