By CHIHAYA INAGAKI/ Staff Writer
July 29, 2020 at 16:46 JST
The new brand logo of Nissan Motor Co. (Provided by Nissan Motor Co.)
Nissan Motor Co. announced July 28 it expects to post a net deficit of 670 billion yen ($6.377 billion) for fiscal 2020, which would mark the second consecutive year of spectacular loss.
Last year, it recorded a net deficit of 671.2 billion yen.
The automaker has not weathered such losses for 20 years or so.
The company was still trying to rebuild itself and dump the expansionist policies of the former chairman, Carlos Ghosn, when the new coronavirus pandemic struck and hammered its sales performance.
Nissan's streamlining strategy involves scaling back excessive production facilities. In fiscal 2019, the company declared a 603-billion-yen extraordinary loss to reorganize the plants and assembly lines.
The automaker forecast sales of 4.125 million vehicles in fiscal 2020, a 16.3 percent drop over the previous fiscal year.
This will result in a 21 percent year-on-year drop in sales to 7.8 trillion yen and an operating deficit of 470 billion yen compared with a deficit of 40.4 billion yen the previous year.
The operating deficit will be its biggest ever, exceeding the 137.9 billion yen deficit in fiscal 2008 after U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed.
At the same time, Nissan disclosed its closing account for the April-June quarter of this year.
It said sales fell by 50.5 percent year-on-year to 1.1741 trillion yen. The operating deficit was 153.9 billion yen. The company earned 1.6 billion yen operating profit during the previous same quarter.
Nissan marked an operating deficit for the first time in the April-June quarter since quarterly results started to be disclosed in 2004. Its net deficit was 285.5 billion yen while its net profit was 6.3 billion yen in the previous same quarter.
“This business performance and the forecast were very tough, but the figures were within my expectations," Makoto Uchida, Nissan's president, said of the forecast of a huge deficit for fiscal 2020 during an online news conference on July 28.
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