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Nintendo makes more profits per employee than both investment bank Goldman Sachs and Google, according to survey put together by the Financial Times.
According to the paper "the programmers of Super Mario Galaxy will generate more profit this year than the average Goldman Sachs banker has ever managed".
Each of the 3,000 staff at Nintendo – most of which work in games development or R&D – will produce $1.6m in profile this year. The average Goldman Sachs employee, meanwhile, generated $1.24m in profit last year. The equivalent figure for Google, the FT claims, is $626,000.
Plus – Nintendo told the paper that with its some of its accounting figures under-estimated (some salaries are classed as R&D spending), the number is probably higher.
This exceptional performance – exceptional as Nintendo works in electronics – comes from the high-volume sales of DS and Wii.
Nintendo’s outsourcing strategy also helps. Said the FT: "All manufacturing of the Wii is outsourced, and even high-profile games such as Mario Party are developed externally, with oversight from Nintendo producers. In spite of their profitability, however, there is unlikely to be an outbreak of programmers driving Maseratis to work at Nintendo’s headquarters in the southern suburbs of Kyoto."
However, despite the company having a market capitalisation of $64m, Nintendo’s staff remain humble, unlike big-shot investment bankers.
“We are not experiencing success,” one Nintendo employee told the FInancial Times, ‘with no sign of dissatisfaction’, “just increased overtime”.
