Shuntaro Furukawa is the new President-in-waiting at Nintendo, assuming he’s confirmed in a couple of months. He’s replacing Tatsumi Kimishima, who took over after the tragic death of Satoru Iwata. Kimishima was always meant to be a placeholder president and maintain stability until Nintendo found a true successor to Iwata. Furukawa is taking no time to unveil his plans for the company’s future and his goals moving forward. Furukawa has a number of goals. He wants to continue to expand Nintendo’s mobile games presence, explore the possibility of films, continue to maintain the Nintendo Switch’s momentum, and “lay down new pathways that positively enhance our dedicated video game platform business.”
These are Furukawa’s statements on his goals as Nintendo’s future president in full. He also speaks about a reorgnization of Nintendo’s executive leadership, so it is apparent that he wants to shake things up and make Nintendo the best that it can be.
“The company will be managed by the members of a new executive management committee under a next-generation collective leadership system. Mr. Kimishima has shown through his own actions what it means to manage a company collectively rather than relying on the efforts of a single person, and I understand my role as one of continuing on that same course. We have executive officers in charge of hardware development, in charge of software development, and in charge of sales and marketing. They all have their different strengths, so I intend to have frequent one-on-one conversations with them, share any background or context behind how things are done, and do everything I can to be mindful of engaging in management together as a team.
As for issues, my highest priority task right now is to accelerate the momentum behind Nintendo Switch and to expand the business. Other issues include the question of how to expand our smart-device business, and whether we can nudge the scale of that business into a larger portion of our overall business.
I am also looking at the topic of the yet-to-be-realized theme park and movie projects that are part of our strategy of expanding the number of people who have access to Nintendo IP (Intellectual Property), and how we can lay down new pathways that positively enhance our dedicated video game platform business.“
Furukawa also talked about the company’s cash reserves and how he plans to invest that money to further the Nintendo brand and continue the innovation that Nintendo is so famous for.
“With regards to the use of cash reserves, we managed to turn a substantial profit in the previous fiscal year (ended March 2018), as was announced. And as you can see in our Earnings Release, the annual dividends this time total 70.8 billion yen. And if you read through the statement of income, you will see that we need to pay corporate income tax and some other taxes. So even though our profits grew, that does not necessarily build up more of our cash reserves, because we have those dividends and taxes to pay.
At its core, the Nintendo business revolves around creating new and innovative content, so that is where we must invest the most. We want to keep consumers engaged, and with technology advancing at such a tremendous pace, we will want to consider investing in parties that have technologies we feel are a good match for Nintendo, if we can find them. I cannot provide any details at this time, but we are looking at all kinds of possibilities, and will continue to do so.”
This is a very exciting time for Nintendo. Kimishima was a great stand-in president, but Furukawa is a young up-and-coming executive who appears to have a great business sense and has a clear-cut vision for the future. Nintendo seems to be in great hands.