Listed companies in Japan saw average pretax profits rise 2% on the year in the April-June quarter, despite April’s consumption tax hike. Automakers and consumer electronics companies were among the top performers in a Nikkei pretax profit ranking for the quarter, on the back of a strong U.S. economy and the expansion of the smartphone market.
The ranking covers companies that closed their books in March.
Toyota Motor ranked first in pretax profits for the second straight year. The auto giant posted its highest quarterly profit for the April-June quarter in seven years, as sluggish domestic sales resulting from the sales tax hike were balanced by brisk sales in North America.
Other automakers also fared well, with Honda Motor moving from the eighth place to fifth thanks to strong profits in Asia. Nissan Motor went from 13th to ninth.
Among consumer electronics companies, Hitachi rose to 16th place thanks to strong sales of information technology equipment and infrastructure-related products. Fanuc achieved a 90% profit increase due to strong sales of equipment used to process smartphone cases, pushing the company from 38th place to 19th.
Panasonic, however, moved down from 11th place to 28th, with its profit declining more than 50%, as the company last year posted a one-time profit boost associated with the change in its pension system. Its operating profit grew 28%, due to the effects of past restructuring measures and strong sales of its solar photovoltaic system.
The size of pretax profits was found to differ greatly even among large companies, without large benefits from the weaker yen that came from the previous fiscal year. Half of the top 20 companies posted profit declines. Trading houses Mitsui & Co. and Mitsubishi Corp. moved down due to profit declines resulting from a decline in coal and iron ore prices. Central Japan Railway (JR Tokai) and East Japan Railway (JR East) moved down as well because of rising costs of repair work and other expenditures.
SoftBank moved down to 11th in the net profit ranks. A one-time chargeThe amount of electricity present upon the capacitor's plates. Also, the act of forcing of electrons onto the capacitor's plates. See CoulombA coulomb is the unit of electric charge. It is named after Charles-Augustin de Coulomb.1 coulomb is the amount of electric charge transported by a current of 1 ampere in 1 second. It can also be defined in terms of capacitance and voltage, where one coulomb is defined as one farad of capacitance times one volt of electric potential difference.. for the investment in an overseas company and tax burdens saw the company’s net profit fall nearly 70% from a year earlier. SoftBank Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son emphasized, though, that his company posted a 90% profit increase, excluding the effects of the one-off charges.
