By Yuri Kageyama, Business Writer
TOKYO (AP) --Nintendo posted an 8.28 billion yen ($67 million) profit for the fiscal first quarter, helped by better sales and a cheap yen, but did not announce a new president to lead the company after the death this month of Satoru Iwata.
Quarterly sales at Nintendo Co., the Japanese video-game maker of the Super Mario and Pokemon franchises, rose 20 percent to 90.2 billion yen ($729 million).
The future direction of the Kyoto-based company could change, depending on who succeeds Iwata. Earlier this year, Nintendo did an about-face and announced it would go into games for mobile devices, a move it had scoffed for years.
No successor for Iwata has been announced, and the company has said it will take its time.
Iwata, president from 2002, was a highly visible spokesman for Nintendo, and many in the game industry mourned the 55-year-old's death, which followed a long illness.
Nintendo has said star game designer Shigeru Miyamaoto will remain in the leadership team along with Genyo Takeda. It is unclear whether one of them would be the next president.
Nintendo had reported a 9.9 billion yen loss for the first quarter of the previous fiscal year.
The manufacturer of the Wii U home console left its annual profit forecast unchanged at 35 billion yen ($283 million).
Nintendo said sales were strong for the 3DS hand-held device, as well as for its amiibo figures.
Nintendo sold 470,000 Wii U machines for the April-June period this year, down from 510,000 the same quarter the previous year. It expects to sell 3.4 million for the year through March 2016.
Foreign exchange gains added 10.8 billion yen to operating income in the quarter, Nintendo said.
The company returned to profit in the fiscal year ended March 2015, after several years of losses.
South Korea fines Meta $15 million for illegally collecting information on Facebook users
South Korea's privacy watchdog on Tuesday fined social media company Meta 21.6 billion won ($15 million) for illegally collecting sensitive personal information from Facebook users, including data about their political views and sexual orientation, and sharing it with thousands of advertisers.
It was the latest in a series of penalties against Meta by South Korean authorities in recent years as they increase their scrutiny of how the company, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, handles private information.
Following a four-year investigation, South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission concluded that Meta unlawfully collected sensitive information about around 980,000 Facebook users, including their religion, political views and whether they were in same-sex unions, from July 2018 to March 2022.
It said the company shared the data with around 4,000 advertisers.
South Korea's privacy law provides strict protection for information related to personal beliefs, political views and sexual behavior, and bars companies from processing or using such data without the specific consent of the person involved.
The commission said Meta amassed sensitive information by analyzing the pages the Facebook users liked or the advertisements they clicked on.
The company categorized ads to identify users interested in themes such as specific religions, same-sex and transgender issues, and issues related to North Korean escapees, said Lee Eun Jung, a director at the commission who led the investigation on Meta.
"While Meta collected this sensitive information and used it for individualized services, they made only vague mentions of this use in their data policy and did not obtain specific consent," Lee said.
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