CANBERRA: Toshiba says it will book a $A460.10 million annual loss to account for a billion dollar profit-padding scandal that hammered the company’s reputation.
The vast 140-year-old conglomerate said that its shortfall for the year to March 2015 would be Y37.8 billion ($A459.94 million), reversing a previously expected Y120 billion annual profit.
Toshiba left unchanged its previously announced Y170 billion operating profit on sales of Y6.65 trillion for its latest fiscal year. But it said it could not supply forecasts for the current year to March 2016.
Investors cheered the revised figures as bringing a sense of closure to the saga, with Toshiba’s Tokyo-listed shares jumping nearly six per cent at one stage before closing 1.75 per cent higher at Y352.7.
‘There is a sense of comfort in that the company was able to get its earnings out,’ said SMBC Nikko Securities manager Chihiro Ota.
He added that other firms which have been dented by accounting scandals, including camera and medical equipment maker Olympus, bounced back after putting out their revised earnings. ‘I suspect Toshiba will take the same course,’ Ota added.
The revised results follow months of delay as an outside panel probed Toshiba’s finances in the wake of revelations that top executives pressured underlings to systematically inflate profits by about $US1.2 billion since the 2008 global financial crisis.
One of the most damaging accounting scandals to hit Japan in recent years, the case prompted an incumbent president and seven other top executives to resign after the company-hired panel found top management complicit in a years-long scheme to pad profits. The embarrassing findings came as Japan adopted a long-awaited corporate governance code aimed at improving firms’ transparency
Best known for its televisions and electronics, including the world’s first laptop personal computer and DVD player, Toshiba has more than 200,000 employees globally and also operates in power transmission and medical equipment.
