Nintendo's 3rd quarter profit jumps on Pokemon game sales

Japanese video game maker Nintendo Co's third-quarter profit more than doubled from a year earlier on healthy sales of Pokemon game software, the company said on Tuesday.

Nintendo, which makes Super Mario games and will start selling the Switch console March 3, reported a better-than-expected October-December profit of 64.7 billion yen ($569 million), up from 29.1 billion yen in the same period of 2015.

Kyoto-based Nintendo raised its full year profit forecast to 90 billion yen ($792 million) from an earlier 50 billion yen ($440 million). That would mark a more than five-fold increase from what it earned the previous fiscal year.

It kept its sales forecast unchanged at 470 billion yen ($4.1 billion). Nintendo's quarterly sales slipped 21 percent to 174.3 billion yen ($1.5 billion).

Nintendo's bottom line also was helped by a relatively weak yen, which lifts the overseas revenue for Japanese companies like Nintendo that do much of their business abroad.

Nintendo has a lot riding on the Switch, the new game system that combines a portable hand-held device with a dock to use at home, and comes with detachable controllers.