Nintendo Nears Sony Market Value, Beats Matsushita

With the company’s stock price continuing to rise the market value - the total value of a company’s shares - of Nintendo has exceeded that of electronics manufacturer Matsushita and closed the gap on rival Sony Corp, despite both companies having vastly greater revenues. According to a new Reuters report, Nintendo’s market value (also referred to as market capitalization) rose to ¥6.30 trillion, as share prices increased by 1.4 percent yesterday. By comparison, Matsushita, best known in the West for the Panasonic brand, have a calculated value of ¥6.23 trillion and Sony Corp. ¥6.64 trillion. These figures come despite both Matsushita and Sony having revenues eight times the size of Nintendo, with the former being the largest consumer electronics company in the world, and the latter the second largest. Although Matsushita shares have grown in value by 53 percent in the last two years, and Sony by 72 percent, Nintendo share prices have risen by almost 400 percent, following first the success of the Nintendo DS, and then the Wii. "Nintendo is a market leader in everything it does now, which is basically the handheld as well as console gaming market. We haven't seen Nintendo being a market leader in both products for over a decade," quotes the Reuters report of KBC Securities analyst Hiroshi Kamide.