Following yesterday's half-year fiscal figures, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata has given his traditional presentation to shareholders to outline a summary of the comanpy's position and forecasts.

Much of the presentation was dedicated to dissecting the worldwide performance of 3DS. While the handheld has had somewhat of a quiet year sales wise, the system seems to be on fairly strong footing in Japan and Europe. In Japan, the handheld regularly makes up for over 50% of all hardware sales every week, and is maintaining high sales even in the non-holiday months.

In Europe, three first-party 3DS games are among the top 20 selling games of the year so far (January-September): Super Mario 3D Land, Mario Kart 7, and New Super Mario Bros. 2. 3D Land has in particular performed well, sitting at the number five spot, behind FIFA 13 on PS3 and Xbox 360, and FIFA 12 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 on PS3.

The 3DS hardware itself, Iwata revealed, enjoyed a greater boost in Europe thanks to the release of the XL model than it did following the price cut a year earlier. The system continues to maintain a "good pace", leading Iwata to feel Nintendo "have laid a firm foundation upon which to accelerate sales further as we head into the year-end season."

In a more global context, Iwata revealed that, despite some conceptions, 3DS was still selling at a faster rate than Nintendo DS after the same amount of time. The fact that 3DS remains ahead of Nintendo DS after seven fiscal quarters is perhaps particularly impressive given that DS enjoyed two holdiay seasons in this time (and the launch of DS Lite), and the 3DS just one.

On this point, Iwata was particularly keen to refute any downplaying of the 3DS's wordwide performance:

"This graph has been created based on sales figures that we announce every quarter in our financial announcements and compares Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS in terms of their quarterly cumulative hardware shipment figures. The Nintendo 3DS system has now passed its seventh quarter, and compared with the Nintendo DS, the Nintendo 3DS has in fact been progressing at a faster sales pace... If you think that the Nintendo 3DS is not off to as good a start as the Nintendo DS because we took a tough decision back in 2011 to perform a markdown, then I would advise you to refer to this graph and think again."

Looking towards the future, Iwata touched upon the strong pre-orders for Wii U, despite Nintendo's mass-media marketing campaign not actually having started yet. Out of the available launch bundles, it is the Premium pack which seems to be performing stronger in terms of pre-orders.

Iwata also pertained to a report that at US retailer GameStop alone, over 250,000 people had signed up to a 'waiting list' after pre-orders completely sold out.

On a more general point about stock issues, the Nintendo president doesn't seem to be ruling out a repeat of the mass sell-outs which accompanied the Wii launch in 2006 and into 2007. He stated "it has now become more likely that it is our production capacity, rather than consumer demand, that will place limits on our Wii U prospects for this calendar year", but pledged that new stock would regularly be provided. 

Finally, Iwata re-iterated that Nintendo hopes to ship 5.5 million Wii U units by the end of the fiscal year (March 2013). This is just shy of the 5.84 million shipped for the Wii launch through to March 2007.

As always, it's well worth examining all of Iwata's words, which elaborate further on Nintendo's systems' performances worldwide, as well as touch on the company's increasing presence in the digital space. Give it a read here.