Japan’s Toshiba said Wednesday that its quarterly net profit tumbled 62 percent from a year earlier as demand for its televisions, computers and other digital products stumbled.
The technology and engineering conglomerate said it earned 23.01 billion yen ($233 million) between January and March, the last quarter of its fiscal year, down from 61.22 billion yen in the same three months a year earlier.
Sales were nearly flat at 1.75 trillion yen, it said.
A sharp decline in the yen has helped many Japanese firms as they report full-year earnings, making them more competitive overseas and boosting the value of repatriated foreign income, which inflates their bottom line.
But the yen’s weakening has had a mixed impact on Toshiba.
Profit margins in its memory chip unit improved while the yen’s depreciation hurt Toshiba’s flat-panel television and personal computer businesses because it imports many dollar-denominated parts to make those goods, boosting production costs.
Electronics manufacturers worldwide are struggling to profit from making televisions as they face fierce competition in the overcrowded, low-margin market.
“The visual products business, which include LCD (liquid crystal display) TVs, saw sales slide on a deepening decline in demand in Japan and sluggish sales in the United States and China,” Toshiba said in a statement published with its quarterly and full-year results.
“The PC business also recorded a decrease on lower unit sales, due to eroding demand in the United States, while Japan and Europe saw flat sales.”
However sales rose in the firm’s elevator and household appliance divisions over the full year to March, it said.
Operating profit in the latest business year was 194.32 billion yen, down 4.1 percent from the previous year and missing the company’s earlier forecast for earnings of 260 billion yen.
Sales in the period were down 4.9 percent to 5.8 trillion yen while Toshiba’s net profit rose 10.7 percent to 77.53 billion yen, it said.
For the current fiscal year to March 2014, Toshiba said it expects net profit to rise 29.0 percent to 100 billion yen on sales of 6.1 trillion yen.
The firm’s stock closed down 5.00 percent at 512 yen on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Wednesday just before it announced the results, after a report in the leading Nikkei business daily pointed to the weaker-than-expected figures.
Toshiba has faced pressure in its key infrastructure business as Japan’s nuclear power plants remained offline with anti-atomic sentiment running high following the Fukushima disaster two years ago.
Japanese companies involved in atomic power have been increasingly looking overseas as demand has dried up at home following the worst nuclear accident in a generation.
Toshiba says quarterly profit tumbles on weak demand
