A few weeks back both Sony and Microsoft did a $100 price cut on their respective game consoles. Sony was the first to do the price cut and was immediately followed by Microsoft. At that time I wrote that Sony’s decision to cut prices by $100 means it needs to generate 23% incremental sales, above and beyond what it would it have achieved without the price cut. The 23% number was based on gross margin and customer margin assumptions I made. Now the third game console maker and the market leader in the next generation game consoles, Nintendo announced a $50 price cut on its Wii. Is this the right move? For Nintendo? For the market profit?
Let us use gross margin and customer margin numbers of $100 and $200 for each Wii. Customer margin here is the net present value of profits from sales of games, complements and other accessories that a console owner buys over the period they own the console.
According to Bloomberg News Service, Nintendo has sold 52 million Wii, Sony 24 million PS3 and Microsoft 30 million. So their units market share numbers are 49%, 22.7% and 28.3%. Nintendo says the addressable market in US is 50 million units. If Sony and Microsoft had not cut their prices, we can assume their share of the addressable market would remain the same. Let us assume Nintendo’s models show Sony selling 23% more units than they would have normally sold due to $100 price cut. Let us also assume Microsoft gains the same – both PS3 and XBox gaining at the expense of Wii. This means Wii stands to lose 5.86 million units sales (email me for numbers).
The drop in total profit to Nintendo, based on $200 customer margin per console is $1.17 billion.
With the $50 price cut, its customer margin falls to $150. If this price cut negates the effects of PS3 and XBox price cut, Nintendo can manage to keep its market share of 49% in the addressable market of 50 million. That is 24.5 million units. The lost profit here is the $50 price cut which comes to $1.226 billion.
In other words their lost profit from price cut even if it helped them retain market share is more (by about $50 million) than the lost profit from loss in market share. But only barely. Since we used assumptions about margins, it is possible that Nintendo’s models showed the price cut would deliver them incremental profit over letting Sony and Microsoft gain market share.
This in the end is a good move for Nintendo. But as a whole, on the 50 million US market identified by Nintendo, because of Sony’s price cut the total market profit shrank by $4 BILLION. That is value destruction!
Iterative Path 