JFE Holdings Inc., created last September by the integration of NKK Corp. and Kawasaki Steel Corp., has reported a group net profit of 15.95 billion yen for the year through March 31.
The profit is above the 11 billion yen forecast on March 6 and better than the combined 60.77 billion yen loss NKK and Kawasaki Steel logged the year before, JFE said Thursday.
In the previous year, NKK alone lost 67.59 billion yen due mainly to the failure of its U.S. subsidiary, National Steel Corp.
This year's profit would have been larger had JFE not booked a one-time loss of 96.36 billion yen, including 28.78 billion yen in appraisal losses on securities holdings and 22.7 billion yen in losses from covering a shortage in retirement allowance reserves.
JFE reported a group pretax profit of 104.67 billion yen, also higher than the earlier projection of 97 billion yen. NKK and Kawasaki Steel had a combined pretax loss of 17.6 billion yen the year before.
Group sales by Japan's second-largest steelmaker totaled 2.42 trillion yen, against the earlier projected 2.44 trillion yen.
For this year, JFE expects a group net profit of 73 billion yen and a group pretax profit of 170 billion yen on sales of 2.36 trillion yen.