Most people who are not shareholders are likely to yawn at quarterly earnings reports published by corporations. However, buried in those otherwise boring numbers could be clues to how a corporation will set its prices in the near future.

Nintendo reported a profit of ¥11.5 billion ($95.8 million) for the first quarter (ending June 30) in Japan. A great percentage of those profits were attributed to the Game Boy Advance's strong sales. The company shifted 3.24 million units, with the new SP model totalling 85 percent of those sales. Disappointingly for Nintendo, the GameCube has continued to fare poorly in the marketplace, with only 80,000 units sold during the quarter. Given that Nintendo is hoping to sell 6 million GCs and 20 million GBAs in the fiscal year ending March 2004, price cuts might be on the way soon to help spur sales.

For the rest of the fiscal year, Nintendo is projecting ¥555 billion ($4.59 billion) of turnover and a profit of ¥65 billion ($542.2 million). Whether or not those numbers will be met is in the air, given stiff competition from Sony and Microsoft, but a strong holiday season will help the company meet those projections.

Update 08.07: The sources for this story misreported the number of GameCubes sold during the quarter. The actual number is 800,000, not 80,000. RPGamer regrets the error.

Update 08.08: We apologize profusely for any confusion, but the original text of the story reported the number of GameCubes sold accurately. Indeed, 80,000 GameCubes were sold, and our original sources were correct in stating this.