Nintendo, the maker of the world’s leading next-generation games console, on Thursday raised its annual earnings outlook and trebled its first-half profit, thanks to the runaway global success of the Wii and the DS, its handheld games player.

Nintendo’s market capitalisation has topped the Y10,000bn mark in Japan, making it the third-most valuable company in Japan after Toyota and the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group. Earlier this year it surpassed its much larger peer Sony in market cap for the first time ever.