Toshiba Corp’s April through September period was about as bad as it had warned (CI No 3,494), and the Japanese giant posted net losses of $175m, down from a profit of $71m last time, on revenues which declined 5% to $18.5bn from $20.24bn. Operating income collapsed from $574m to a loss of $226m. Toshiba is part way through a lay-off program that will see 6,500 workers given pink slips by March 2000, but it still thinks it will be able to eke out growth of 1% to $40.74bn for the full year. Like Fujitsu before it (CI No 3,524), Toshiba said decline in sales in its home markets were primarily to blame. A fall of only 2% in sales of information and communications systems masked a decline of 13% at home that was offset by a rise of 12% overseas. PCs were particularly strong, it said. Revenue from sales of 64Mbit DRAM, color monitors, and LCDs collapsed due to price erosion. Semicondcutor sales declined 8%. Power and industrial systems declined 14%, consumer products were down 1% while services increased 14% mainly due to overseas sales. Overall production Japanese IT production is expected to fall for the first time in five years. Local papers report output for the first eight months of the year was down 11.7% over last year at $28.37bn. Output for the year is expected to be well down on 1997’s $48.59bn. Peripheral hardware production has fallen 5%, and PC and mainframes by 20%. Japanese firms are spending less on IT. Capital spending on IT is 23% of budgets, down from 25%.
