Struggling Japanese conglomerate Toshiba Corp yesterday said it had bounced back into the black after a disastrous year and would avoid a humiliating delisting from the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
“We were able to exit from a critical situation by eliminating excessive debt at the end of March,” Toshiba chief executive Nobuaki Kurumatani told a news conference. “I personally regard it as the starting line for us ... for transforming into an excellent company that can survive competition with global excellent companies.”
The firm said it had booked a record net profit of ￥804 billion (US$7.3 billion), compared with a loss of ￥965.7 billion a year earlier.
Photo: Reuters
That marks the first net profit for the firm in four years and was helped by one-off revenue from tax cuts linked to the sale of its nuclear units.
However, operating profit dropped 21.9 percent to ￥64.1 billion, while sales declined 2.4 percent to ￥3.95 trillion.
Toshiba had been on the ropes after its disastrous acquisition of US nuclear energy firm Westinghouse Electric Co, which racked up billions of dollars in losses before being placed under bankruptcy protection.
Those losses came to light as the group was still reeling from revelations that top executives had pressured underlings to cover up weak results for years after the 2008 global financial meltdown.
To survive and avoid delisting, the cash-strapped group decided on the multibillion-dollar sale of its prized chip business to a consortium led by Bain Capital.
The chip unit brought in about 90 percent of Toshiba’s total operating profit in the first six months of the last fiscal year and was the crown jewel in a vast range of businesses ranging from home appliances to nuclear reactors.
At the time the deal was seen as crucial to keeping it afloat after multibillion-dollar losses.
Toshiba yesterday said it was still waiting for Chinese antitrust authorities to approve the key sale, but denied speculation that it was considering reversing course in the deal.
In November last year, Toshiba said it planned to raise ￥600 billion by issuing new shares, a move aimed at avoiding delisting even if the chip sale was delayed.
The firm said it expected a net profit of ￥1.07 trillion for the year to March next year, up 33.1 percent from the previous year, on sales of ￥3.6 trillion.
Investors cheered the results, with Toshiba shares closing up 3.46 percent at ￥299 in Tokyo.
Tokyo-based Ace Research Institute analyst Hideki Yasuda warned that the sale of the chip business would be crucial.
Gudeng Precision Industrial Co (家登精密), the sole extreme ultraviolet pod supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電), yesterday said it has trimmed its revenue growth target for this year as US tariffs are likely to depress customer demand and weigh on the whole supply chain. Gudeng’s remarks came after the US on Monday notified 14 countries, including Japan and South Korea, of new tariff rates that are set to take effect on Aug. 1. Taiwan is still negotiating for a rate lower than the 32 percent “reciprocal” tariffs announced by the US in April, which it later postponed to today. The
ELECTRONICS: Strong growth in cloud services and smart consumer electronics offset computing declines, helping the company to maintain sales momentum, Hon Hai said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) on Saturday announced that its sales for last month rose 10 percent year-on-year, driven by strong growth in cloud and networking products amid the ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) boom. The company, also known internationally as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), reported consolidated sales of NT$540.24 billion (US$18.67 billion) for the month, the highest ever for the period, and a 10.09 percent increase from a year earlier, although it was down 12.26 percent from the previous month. Hon Hai, which is Apple Inc’s primary iPhone assembler and makes servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s AI accelerators, said its cloud
Video streaming giant Netflix is launching a talent cultivation program in Taiwan aimed at producing high-quality Mandarin content, the company announced in a press release on Thursday. Netflix Chinese language content head Maya Huang (黃怡玫) said that Netflix has long invested in the Taiwanese market, citing the Netflix Fund for Creative Equity launched last year as an example. The fund would continue to dedicate resources to discovering content with the potential to be developed into Chinese-language projects, she added. The financing for the new talent projects seeks to create an ecosystem for content creators and professional development programs, she said. The talent projects
APPRECIATION: The central bank stepped in to stabilize the NT dollar after a surge in foreign institutional investment, triggered by optimism about tariffs and US Fed policy Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves hit a record high at the end of last month, as the central bank intervened in the currency market to curb the New Taiwan dollar’s appreciation against the US dollar. Foreign exchange reserves increased by US$5.48 billion from May, reaching an all-time high of US$598.43 billion, the central bank said on Friday. While the central bank did not disclose the scale of its intervention, Department of Foreign Exchange Director-General Eugene Tsai (蔡炯民) said that the currency market remained relatively stable until the middle of last month. However, a shift occurred following the US Federal Reserve’s signal of a
RSS