It was held in Japan during the last Spanish dawn from Thursday to Friday Nintendo’s last annual shareholder meeting. A meeting of shareholders and directors that repeats itself every summer and which on many occasions gives us a glimpse into some of the company’s closest movements, hidden among the many pages and documents made available to the public.

So on this occasion, investors did not hesitate to ask why last month, June 2022, Nintendo’s spending on supplies and raw materials skyrocketed to ¥66.5 billion (approximately more than 470 million euros), standing out especially from the figures of previous years, reaching five times the expenditure of the last two years (9,553 million yen in 2021 and 12,448 million yen in 2020).

And the thing is, going back just one year, with the accounts presented in June 2019, just a few months before the arrival of the Nintendo Switch Lite and revisions to the standard model with the Mariko chip showed another unusual peak in the category, tripling the previous year’s spending to ¥32,432 million.

Shuntaro Furukawa, president of Nintendo, vaguely apologized for these costs, assuring that «in a situation of lack of supply and demand for components semiconductor related, it is necessary to prepare for production, ensuring stocks of raw materials and components earlier than in previous cases. The first reason is that we have more inventory than before. The second reason is the change in the accounting approach with the adoption of the new revenue accounting standard.«.

Even so, this fact was not long in coming and triggered all the alarms of participants in the video game market pointing to the possible arrival of a new Nintendo console in the not too distant future. And it’s no secret that in addition to the latest Nintendo Switch OLED presentation, the Japanese company is preparing a new console adapted to the standards of a new generation of consoles.

This new console apparently maintains a hybrid format for portable and tabletop games and iterates with a pocket-sized “handheld” design, it obviously won’t have the potential to directly compete with the PS5 and Xbox series, although it could certainly recover some of the ground that other devices like the Steam Deck are now gaining .