China Steel Corp (中鋼), the nation’s largest steelmaker with 11 million tonnes of annual capacity, said yesterday its pretax profits fell 30.5 percent from a year earlier, as the company was under pressure because of higher raw material costs while adjusting down wholesale prices for its domestic customers.
Last month’s pretax profit of NT$2.03 billion (US$66 million) compared with NT$3.18 billion a year earlier and was 36.09 percent lower than NT$3.17 billion in the previous month, according to the company’s stock exchange filing yesterday and from previous financial statements.
Based on the 13.53 billion shares the Kaohsiung-based company has in issue, earnings per share were NT$0.15 last month.
Revenue rose 28.6 percent to NT$21.04 billion last month from a year earlier, the filing said.
The figure was up 1.62 percent from the previous month, company data showed.
In the first 10 months of the year, the company’s pretax profit totaled NT$39.98 billion, or NT$2.95 in earnings per share, which was far higher than the NT$5.43 billion it made in the same period of last year. Revenue totaled NT$198.51 billion over the same period, up 50.72 percent from NT$131.7 billion last year.
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