Video games firm’s sales drop countered by unspecified tariff refund, as customers sue to recoup tariff price costs.
Nintendo, the Japanese game maker, has reported a surge in Q2 profits it says were aided by a refund on the tariffs it paid in 2025 and early 2026 that were determined to be illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court.
While sales were down 10% for the three months to June compared with the same period last year, to ¥517.8 billion ($3.29 billion), the company’s profits rose 53.5% to ¥147.4 billion, substantially beating market forecasts for ¥77.8 billion, reports The Guardian.
The company filed a lawsuit weeks after the February U.S. supreme court ruling, demanding a full refund from the White House, plus interest. Nintendo has declined to confirm it has received a full refund, and is resisting calls to pass the money back to consumers.
According to Forbes, Nintendo was hit in July with a class action lawsuit on behalf of customers, which claims the company hiked its prices because of tariffs but later benefited from the refunds. Nintendo’s lawyers said the lawsuit was “meritless,” and that the price customers paid represented “the purchase price of the goods they wanted and received.”
Forbes said that only a handful of companies have said they would issue refunds. Costco said in March the company would turn tariff refunds into “lower prices and better values,” and Walmart executives stated they plan to use the funds to support price cuts and rollbacks for customers. According to CNN, Amazon has been an outlier, saying it will give customers a direct refund where the e-commerce retailer can trace that it passed specific import charges on to customers.
