Major nonferrous metal smelter Mitsubishi Materials Corp. said Thursday it slashed its group net loss to 26.85 billion yen in fiscal 2002 from the previous year's 61.32 billion yen on the strength of cost cuts and fewer special losses.
In addition, the company brought its group pretax balance 10.39 billion yen into the black, a turnaround from the previous year's 19.10 billion yen loss.
But sales dropped 7.8 percent to 964.73 billion yen on falling prices and shrinking demand for copper and gold, it said. It will skip a dividend payment for fiscal 2002, as it did a year earlier.
The company blamed the net loss chiefly on extraordinary losses of 57.83 billion yen, including an appraisal loss of 20.86 billion yen on its shareholdings and 10.45 billion yen for paying out retirement benefits.
But the special losses were much smaller than the previous year's 90.28 billion yen.
The impact of the one-off losses on its net profitability for the reporting year was tempered by a range of one-time gains, including a 4.96 billion yen profit from the sale of its shareholdings as well as a 3.15 billion yen gain from the sale of its fixed assets, the company said.