Financial

posted on 30 July 2008 13:36

Toshiba became awash with red ink as revenues and income both declined in its Q2 calendar year 08 and net losses reached ¥11.605 billion. Yet it will still increase NAND production capacity.

Fumio Muraoka, Toshiba Corporation's Representative Executive Officer, said: "Our results were very disappointing." The results were lousy because Toshiba's semiconductor business was lousy. Its sales fell 4 percent, compared to Q2 cy07's ¥291.5 billion. Operating income fell about ¥54 billion as Toshiba recorded a ¥30.2 billion operating loss.

Things that contributed to the loss were price erosion, poor sales of SoC (system on chip) home appliance product, and foreign exchange costs due to the strong yen. The average selling price (ASP) for NAND products was 20 percent less than in the first three months of 2008. Toshiba expects it to decline another 15 percent in the third quarter.

In the face of this unremitting price trend SanDisk, which is partnering Toshiba, is putting back its investment in a Toshiba NAND flash operation. Toshiba is not. It wants to get more NAND chips out of a wafer and so lower its costs faster than the NAND industry price erosion curve. The company is moving to a 43nm process and half of its production should use that process by the end of September.

Overall Toshiba's outlook for the first half of its current financial year (April to September 2008) is for ¥70 billion operating income and both increased revenues and income for the full year (April 2008 to March 2009).

More here.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}