Mitsubishi Electric Corp. said Monday its business group posted a net profit of 1.1 billion yen during the October-December term, a turnaround from a net loss of 38.4 billion yen in the same period a year earlier.

The electric machinery maker said it will resume yearend dividend payments for the 2002 business year, which ends March 31, for the first time in two years with a per-share dividend of 3 yen.

Mitsubishi Electric attributed the net profit to enhanced cost-cutting efforts and improvements in businesses related to communications and semiconductor equipment.

The company's group pretax profit came to 3.4 billion yen during the third quarter, compared with a loss of 8.8 billion yen in the same term a year before, on a 1 percent rise in sales to 788.7 billion yen.

Mitsubishi Electric said it bolstered its group net profit for the first nine months of the business year to 7.9 billion yen against a loss of 36.8 billion yen during the same period the previous year.

But group sales during the April-December period fell 5 percent to 2.428 trillion yen.

Its full-year earnings forecast released Oct. 29 remained unchanged, with a projected group net profit of 25 billion yen, a turnaround from a loss of 77.97 billion yen the previous year, on sales of 3.65 trillion yen, almost the same as the previous year's 3.649 trillion yen.

It skipped dividend payments for all of 2001 and for the 2002 midterm.