During Nintendo’s recent shareholder Q&A, CEO Shuntaro Furukawa was asked a question about how Nintendo shares its profits with its employees. Furukawa’s reply was reported to have been that staff had been given a 10-percent raise. It’s now been revealed, after a delayed official publication of the Q&A, that the raise he was referring to in fact took place in 2023.
“Our fundamental approach is to set salary levels appropriately, taking into account industry trends and broader social conditions,” Furukawa says (via machine translation) in Nintendo’s belated PDF. “Salaries form the foundation of our employees’ livelihoods; if pay were to fluctuate drastically based on business performance, it would be difficult for them to work with peace of mind. We believe that setting appropriate compensation levels is crucial to maintaining an environment where employees can take on the challenge of creating new forms of entertainment without fear of failure.”
The CEO then went on to explain, “We raised base salaries in Japan by 10 percent in April 2023,” adding, “Since then, we have continued to review our compensation system to ensure that remuneration aligns with employees’ demonstrated capabilities, and in April 2026 we implemented further salary increases, including for starting pay.”
It’s worth remembering that the above is a machine translation and not Nintendo’s official publication of its responses in English, which still have yet to appear on the corporate site. Completely missing until today, there is now an entry reading “Q & A (to be posted later).” This is taking an unusually long time, but it’s important to take everything with a pinch of robotic salt until we can see how Nintendo phrases these words.
Last week, most of the reporting of the event was based on posts from the X account NStyles, who attended the meeting and posted live coverage of the questions and answers in Japanese. Various machine translations of the unofficial posts were used to cover the questions and answers, and it was from this that it became widely reported that Nintendo was presently providing staff with a 10-percent salary bump. Now that Nintendo’s official posting of the Q&A is online, albeit again by machine translation, it’s become apparent that this raise in question was three years old, rather than a new development.
Disunion
The specifics on the question also remain a little peculiar. In NStyles’ original coverage the question read,
I understand that Nintendo does not have a labor union; I would like to know how the company shares its profits with employees.
However, in Nintendo’s official publication it simply says,
How do you share the company’s success with employees?
The shareholder Q&A is a private event, and no recordings or video are made public, so there is no way to independently verify which version of the question is more accurate, but each certainly frames things very differently. We contacted NStyles, who confirmed for us (in English) that he heard the question above, and it was framed around the lack of a union. We’ve contacted Nintendo to ask for more details. It would certainly be quite something if Nintendo had chosen to change the question in its own coverage to remove the issue of unions.
