Saturday May 2, 04:28 AM
Japan sees pretax loss to March: report
TOKYO (AFP) - Japan's major companies slipped into the red for the three months through March 31, battered by a slump in exports following the global financial crisis, a newspaper reported.
The Nikkei business daily carried out an earnings survey covering 262 non-financial firms listed on Japanese stock exchanges, which announced their January-March earnings as of Friday.
Combined pretax losses reported by the firms totalled 353 billion yen (3.6 billion dollars) for the January-March quarter, a reversal from the year-earlier profits of 2.51 trillion yen, the newspaper said.
Their quarterly revenue fell 24 percent from a year earlier due to stagnant demand in the United States, Europe and Asia in the wake of the global economic turmoil, it said.
For the full business year through March 31, pretax profit dropped 52 percent and sales slipped five percent, the first decline in both profits and sales since in the fiscal year to March 2002, it said.
The situation was particularly grim for automakers and electronics manufacturers that have a relatively strong reliance on the United States and Europe, it said.
By contrast, non-manufacturers, such as power utilities and telecommunications companies, enjoyed a three percent rise in pretax profits, buoyed by falling resource prices and steady domestic demand, it added.
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