The Video Game Critic

[QUOTE=Iain]I doubt Nintendo are wanting Share Prices to go that high. When the Price of individual shares starts reaching that kind of silly level people stop buying as they start to become too expensive to afford. Nintendo will almost certainly issue new shares in order to cut the price of individual shares while keeping the companies value the same.

At any rate it is clear investors are confident in Nintendo, but it is silly to try and take sides here. All three companies are rather distasteful multi-nationals, but at the same time all three produce products that I love. So I enjoy the systems of all three companies while not having any love for the executives of any.

And if Sony does too badly, rather than that being the wonderful thing some people imagine, it will just mean the end of a great console line. I hope the PS3 improves soon and becomes a machine worth buying, because Sony wont keep subsidising a failing product forever.[/QUOTE]

Just curious: Is there something specific about each company that makes them distasteful for you, or is because they are multi national itself that makes them distasteful?

-Rob

I think The Times today got it right, in that Sony is, at the moment, undervalued.

[QUOTE=john-boy]I think The Times today got it right, in that Sony is, at the moment, undervalued.[/QUOTE]

I don't know if I agree with the Times on that.  I have two subscription services I use which value Sony at about $5 under the market share price in real asset value per share.

But one thing is for sure, Sony's stock value is much closer to their real asset value than Nintendo's, which both subscription services value at about $20 under the market share price in real asset value per share.

There are investment strategies, mostly short-term, that don't care about that kind of asset assessment, because the market value is more important when you intend to sell as close to the peak of a rally as possible.  But for long-term investors, Nintendo isn't as attractive a stock as Sony, due to the likelihood that the stock will drop dramatically to a sum closer to the real asset value in the long-term.

Still the situation is good for both companies.  It's usually better for the company itself to be overvalued than undervalued for a number of reasons, including that the latter condition can attract the more aggressive investors seeking to take a corporation over for liquidation of assets.

[QUOTE=feilong80]Just curious: Is there something specific about each company that makes them distasteful for you, or is because they are multi national itself that makes them distasteful? -Rob [/QUOTE]Well I am not a fan of multi-nationals in general. I generally find their behaviour distaseful.

As fr specific practices, I won't go into details there, but Nintendo particularly annoys me for their European price fixing. They were fined millions for it a few years ago and things have gotten better since then. But all the same it was infuriating.

Ugh, well, maybe this is going into specifics. But how exactly were they fixing prices? Were they setting higher prices for their consoles/hardware/first party software in the EU?

-Rob

[QUOTE=feilong80]Ugh, well, maybe this is going into specifics. But how exactly were they fixing prices? Were they setting higher prices for their consoles/hardware/first party software in the EU? -Rob [/QUOTE]They were running a cartel with several distribution chains. The effort was to artificially raise prices in certain countries.

You can get the basic story Here

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2375967.stm