NINTENDO Co. reported fiscal first-quarter profit that missed the lowest analyst estimate as consumers shrugged off a sluggish lineup of new games.

Operating income slid about 10% to 27.4 billion yen ($252 million) in the three months ended June, the Kyoto-based company said in a statement on Tuesday. That’s less than the 37.2 billion yen average of analyst projections compiled by Bloomberg. Net sales inched up to 172.1 billion yen. Nintendo left its full-year profit and revenue outlooks unchanged.

Nintendo in April put out earnings projections that fell far below analyst estimates despite a strong lineup of games for later this year and expectations for stronger hardware growth. The launch slate includes a new installment in the Zelda saga, Luigi’s Mansion and two Pokémon games. The company is also releasing a cheaper version of its portable Switch gaming console and plans to enter the Chinese market. The anticipation has driven up Nintendo’s shares 39% this year.

“While the first quarter is pretty light, there is a lot to look forward to in the rest of the year,” Jefferies Group senior analyst Atul Goyal said ahead of the earnings release. “Switch Lite and China should also add to the sales.”

The company kept its conservative forecast for operating profit of 260 billion yen on 1.25 trillion yen in revenue for the year ending March 2020. That’s far short of analyst expectations for 315 billion yen and 1.31 trillion yen respectively. The company expects to sell 18 million Switch units and 125 million new software titles.

The Switch sports a stronger software lineup later this fiscal year. Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield are slated by the end of the year. New entries in the Animal Crossing and Luigi’s Mansion series are also scheduled for this year, as well as a remake of an older Zelda title.

President Shuntaro Furukawa in April confirmed that Nintendo is working with Tencent Holdings Ltd. to sell the Switch in China, but said there’s no timeline for a launch. While demand for console gaming remains limited on the mainland, analysts say closer ties with the social media giant could lead to Nintendo releasing mobile titles in China, the world’s biggest gaming market.

Smartphone game revenue rose 10% in the quarter from a year ago to 10 billion yen. Nintendo released Dr. Mario World for mobile this month, but the most anticipated title is the upcoming Mario Kart Tour. Analysts have speculated that Mario Kart could become a billion-dollar grossing app if executed properly, but the company has delayed the title once and has yet to provide a single screenshot of the game.

“Nintendo has yet to announce the release date for Mario Kart Tour, which is due this summer, and that could serve as a share price catalyst,” Goyal said.

The Switch Lite will retail for $199.99, or $100 less than the original device, in time for the all-important holiday shopping season. The new console will be released Sept. 20 and comes in yellow, gray and turquoise. The cheaper Switch is aimed at expanding the market so more people will buy the company’s games.

“Switch Lite is a nice replacement for people who are still playing on the 3DS,” Goyal said. “That installed base is about 75 million, and with the Lite model Nintendo can start appealing to them.” — Bloomberg

HERE’S a job any worker would be happy to pass off to a drone: Imagine crawling down a ladder into the vast darkness of a 20-story-high storage tank filled with toxic chemical fumes to spend hours searching for corrosion.

More than a thousand US laborers have been killed working in confined spaces like that in the past decade. One of them was 43-year-old Clinton Miller, an AkzoNobel NV employee who passed out after entering a tank to retrieve a piece of trash at a North Carolina chemical plant last year. Oxygen levels were found to be just 11% inside the structure, according to a federal incident report.

Enter the ever-more capable drone. Companies including Dow Inc., AT&T Inc., BASF SE and Royal Dutch Shell Plc have begun assembling fleets of the flying automatons to take over their most dangerous jobs. Ascending several hundred feet in the air to inspect tanks and towers, squeezing through claustrophobic tunnels to replace a faulty part, or peering into the maw of a flame-belching smokestack — all are jobs that robots are being designed to do, companies say.

“We look at these tasks and say, ‘Is there a better way that we can do this without exposing the worker to risk?’” said Chris Witte, manager of chemical giant BASF’s Freeport, Texas, site. “The answer is yes. We can send a drone in.” Drones now fly every day at the Freeport plant, keeping workers off scaffolding and out of tanks.

For all the talk of automation and robotics replacing human labor, the new uses of drones show how technology can cut costs for companies while dramatically reducing risk, and even saving lives. They also show why businesses are pressing hard in Washington for the ability to use drones in more situations.

Inspections of gas flares at Shell’s refineries used to take days, said Randy Burow, Shell’s health and safety manager. To get workers close enough to the flame-spewing stacks to check the pilot light, the system had to be taken offline, then workers were hoisted in a basket several hundred feet high to the top of the stack. Now drones can complete the inspection of still-burning flares in a few hours without a worker ever leaving the ground.

In 2017, 166 US workers died in confined spaces. But that number pales when compared with the 887 killed by falls, the second-biggest cause of workplace deaths after car accidents, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

AT&T has invested in a large fleet of drones to help inspect its 65,000 cell towers in the US, which can rise as high as 1,000 feet. Working on them is especially perilous: Tower climbers fall to their death at nearly 10 times the rate of construction workers.

The telecom giant has used drones to eliminate 5,000 tower climbs in the past 18 months, said Art Pregler, the director of AT&T’s drone program.

With high-powered cameras attached, increasingly agile drones operated by an earthbound human can soar to the top of a tower in minutes, float among the steel frames and zoom in for close-up inspections. Drones send images so detailed that workers on the ground can count the threads on a bolt, said Pat Dempsey, who oversees telecommunications maintenance at power utility PSEG Inc. “The fact you don’t have to make a person climb that tower, from a safety standpoint, it’s a game changer.”

Federal safety regulators are still reviewing the 2018 incident that killed ​AkzoNobel’s employee. The company declined to comment.

Even with precautions including safety gear, air monitoring and rescue workers on standby, things can still go wrong with so-called confined-space entries by people. The scale of some of the tanks is massive, comparable to a 2-inch-tall person crawling into a household water heater unit, said Billy Bardin, Dow’s global technology director.

Dow, one of the world’s largest chemical makers, said it used robots for more than 1,000 confined-space entries in 2018, and for another 1,000 external inspections that involved high elevations, significantly cutting down on the risks to its workers.

“That kind of entry is one of the most potentially hazardous activities that we do,” said Bardin.

The company’s goal is to reduce the number of human entries into such confined spaces to zero by 2025. That would require developing drones that can conduct repairs and other tasks, rather than just broadcast video, according to Bardin.

Technology is speeding in that direction. The average commercial drone costs about $25,000, but as requirements become more specialized, the price can rise as high as $250,000, said Chuck Dorgan, sales director at German manufacturer Microdrones GmbH.

“I get asked by companies almost every week if we can do something that I’ve never thought of doing with a drone,” said Ed Hine, vice president for operations at PrecisionHawk Inc., another drone company.

Apellix, a commercial drone startup in Jacksonville, Florida, is designing drones to paint multistory buildings and industrial structures — a job that now requires workers to be elevated with bucket lifts or scaffolding.

“Nobody wants to be at the top of a 200-foot man-lift in 98-degree Southern heat painting an industrial structure,” said company co-founder Jeff McCutcheon.

Replacing humans can get complicated: The drones must be tethered to a paint source on the ground, batteries must be periodically recharged and windy conditions can blow paint off target. But McCutcheon predicts within five years drones will allow a two-man ground-based crew to paint the exterior of a Walmart in four hours instead of several days.

The number of commercial drones registered with the Federal Aviation Administration exploded in 2018 to 277,000, though that’s still enough to do only a small fraction of industry’s dangerous jobs.

Regulations that restrict how far, how high and where drones can fly are expected to loosen in the next few years, leading to wider commercial adoption. The FAA estimates commercial drones could triple by 2023 — and possibly increase as much as fivefold.

Companies have every reason to accelerate drone use as quickly as they’re allowed.

“Drones save us downtime, save cost, save on productivity for our maintenance personnel,” said Dow’s Bardin, “and they eliminate having to put a person in that potentially hazardous environment.” — Bloomberg