Major trading house Nissho Iwai Corp. on Tuesday announced a three-year restructuring plan featuring a cut of 5,000 jobs from its current consolidated workforce of 19,000.

Nissho Iwai will eliminate 700 jobs on a parent-company basis to bring its staff to 1,900.

The new program for fiscal 2002 to 2004, which ends in March 31, 2005, is also designed to cut Nissho Iwai's consolidated interest-bearing debts to 1.3 trillion yen from 2.37 trillion yen, the company said.

To attain the debt reduction target, the company will consider securitizing its main office building in Tokyo and disposing of idle real estate and financial assets.

To boost earnings, Nissho Iwai will spend 160 billion yen during the three years primarily on five business areas -- resources and energy, aerospace and aviation, electronics and communications, automobiles, and life-related goods and services such as foods and product distribution.

The new program is expected to help Nissho Iwai chalk up a consolidated net profit of 22.5 billion yen and a pretax profit of 73 billion yen on group sales of 4.7 trillion yen in fiscal 2004.

The corresponding figures in fiscal 2000 were 20.04 billion yen, 39.06 billion yen and 6.47 trillion yen.

Bad assets have plagued the industry since the collapse of the asset-inflated bubble economy imploded.

Marubeni Corp., which has already shown its move to write off massive losses, is expected to soon announce details of a reconstruction plan.