BackHonda Q4 profit down 52%, gives no annual guidance
Honda Q4 profit down 52%, gives no annual guidance
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Tokyo: Honda Motor Co reported a 52% fall in quarterly operating profit and refrained from providing an outlook for the new year as it struggles to measure the speed of its recovery after last month’s massive earthquake in Japan.
Japanese automakers have yet to figure out how fast all of the parts makers affected by the magnitude-9.0 quake on 11 March will fully recover, making it difficult to give an earnings projection for the business year to March 2012.
Japan’s biggest earthquake on record has disrupted the supply of hundreds of components from the country’s northeast region, reversing what had been shaping up to be a firm recovery from the global financial crisis a few years ago.
While the supply bottleneck of certain specialty components such as microcontroller units has also hit some automakers outside Japan, the brunt of the pain is being borne by domestic brands such as Honda, where production remains at half the level planned before the quake.
Honda, Japan’s third-biggest automaker, said this week it expected production to return to normal by the end of 2011, echoing earlier comments by Toyota Motor Corp, but neither specified how quickly volumes would pick up.
For the January-March quarter, Honda’s operating profit was ¥46.21 billion ($562 million), compared with an average estimate of ¥103.1 billion from 15 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
The company said the earthquake had a ¥45.7 billion negative impact on fourth-quarter operating profit.
Fourth-quarter net profit, which includes profits made in China, fell 38% to ¥44.55 billion.
A survey of 15 analysts put Honda’s operating profit for the full year to March 2012 at ¥394 billion, down from ¥569.8 billion in the business year that just ended.
Honda’s shares are down 6.2% from pre-quake levels, compared with a 7.6% fall in Tokyo’s transport sectors subindex.
Honda shares ended up 2.9% at ¥3,190 before the results were announced on Thursday. The filing was delayed by 20 minutes, to 3:20 pm, due to an administrative error on Honda’s part, it said.
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