Suzuki slashes forecast but secures profit on India
Suzuki slashes forecast but secures profit on India
Tokyo: Japan’s Suzuki Motor Corp on Thursday cut its annual operating profit forecast by a third as slumping global car sales and a strong yen hammered third-quarter results.
Suzuki, maker of the Swift and other small cars, now expects operating profit for the year to March 31 of ¥67 billion ($750 million) instead of ¥100 billion. A survey of 19 brokerages by Reuters Estimates put the consensus forecast at ¥79 billion.
It sees net profit at ¥22 billion instead of ¥60 billion.
The revisions still put Suzuki in a thinning camp of Japanese automakers expecting to stay in the black this year. Most have slashed their forecasts since the last quarter to call for a loss as vehicle inventory piles up and factories are idled.
For the October-December quarter, Suzuki posted an operating profit to ¥5.8 billion, worse than the market estimates of about ¥9 billion. It made ¥38.3 billion in the year-earlier three months.
It booked a quarterly net loss of ¥12.6 billion, compared with a profit of ¥21.6 billion a year earlier.
Selling roughly half of its cars in Japan and India, Suzuki is less vulnerable to the dollar’s fall than its domestic peers.
Car sales in India, Suzuki’s single-biggest market, have been slipping due to scarce financing and a slowing economy but not as fast as the drops in the United States and Europe.
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