Kanebo Ltd. said Tuesday it logged 314.97 billion yen in net profit for the year ended in March, thanks mostly to gains from the selloff of its mainstay cosmetics business and a debt-waiver from lenders.
The company posted a 142.09 billion yen net loss a year ago. Revenue for fiscal 2004 fell 40 percent to 268.5 billion yen, due to the sale of part of its food, fashion and textile divisions.
The troubled household product maker, with help from the Industrial Revitalization Corp. of Japan, is scheduled to be delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange on June 13 in connection with a massive accounting fraud.
Once the country's textile giant, the company has been selling off its loss-making businesses to turn into a maker of household products, Chinese medicine and food products. For fiscal 2004, the firm said these three core units posted a combined 5.2 billion yen operating profit, compared with a 6.71 billion yen operating loss a year ago.
"The performance of the core three businesses has been solid. Their profit improvement has been better than expected," Takehiko Ogi, Kanebo president, told a news conference.
The former Ministry of International Trade and Industry bureaucrat was sent by the IRCJ to oversee the firm's turnaround.
Asked about the prospect of going public again, Ogi declined comment, saying the firm's current priority is to improve its corporate value.