How ridiculously wealthy is Nintendo this year?
Despite reporting on it back in 2007 and reading the Wikipedia entryso many times, we're still foggy on what market capitalization is -- we think it's basically how many shares of stock are in the public, multiplied by the cost of one share. We have an impressionistic idea of what it means, though: the bigger the number, the more likely the company's executives are to have Segways (for example).
So how did Nintendo fare? They finished 2008 with the fourth-highest market cap in Japan, according to the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The number, 4.7813 trillion yen ($52.7 billion), is way down from where it was in 2007, but what isn't? A halved market cap actually sounds bad, and it probably is, but they're still in the top 5 companies, and still selling tons of systems and games, so it's probably nothing to worry about. First-place Toyota dropped 54% themselves!
[Via Kotaku]
