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Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima has set a date for his retirement, and will be leaving the role on June 28th 2018.
He will be replaced by 46-year-old Shuntaro Furukawa, with Kotaku (translating a story from Nikkei) reporting that “Kimishima will remain at Nintendo in an advisory role.” Furukawa has been at Nintendo since 1994, working as managing executive officer, supervisor of corporate analysis & administration division and director of Nintendo for the past two years.
The Nikkei article also reported that Kimishima stepping down is not due to his performance, but comes from Nintendo’s will to have a younger president in order to understand its customers.
“We will develop the company to its fullest,” Furukawa said during a conference in Osaka, Bloomberg reported. “I will balance Nintendo’s traditions: originality and flexibility.”
After a 27 years career in banking, Kimishima became The Pokémon Company’s CFO in 2000 and then president of Pokémon USA. In 2002, he was appointed president of Nintendo of America and then CEO four years later. In 2013, he was promoted to Nintendo’s managing director and was appointed as Nintendo’s president in September 2015, after the death of Saturo Iwata. He was a key figure in the launch of the Switch and in Nintendo’s recent push into mobile.
