Hitachi posted a quarterly loss Tuesday on slow television sales and a tax write-down but said it would rebound to a profit that year on a recovery in hard drives, pushing its shares up nearly 6 percent.

Hitachi, the biggest Japanese industrial electronics company, aims to outrun a stronger yen and price drops that year by focusing resources on high-capacity hard drives and plasma television sales in China.

But Hitachi said losses would continue that year in its plasma TVs, with an executive skirting questions about when the business would turn into the black.

“We certainly hope that the business would turn profitable next business year,” Toyoaki Nakamura, senior vice president, told a news conference.

For the financial year to next March, Hitachi expects a net profit of yen40 billion, or $386 million. That would compare with a net loss of yen58.13 billion the previous year but would miss the average estimate of a yen64.5 billion profit from 10 analysts

surveyed by Reuters.

On an operating basis, Hitachi said it expected profit to rise 10 percent to yen380 billion that year.

After the announcement, shares of Hitachi held earlier gains and closed up 5.9 percent at yen719.

“A 10 percent rise — whether they can achieve that — it’s not poor at all,” said Tomomi Yamashita, a fund manager at Shinkin Asset Management. “There was some talk that they’d be much more conservative.”

Hitachi, whose empire includes booming infrastructure-related operations, slumping electronics and cutting-edge research centers, has promised to trim or turn around subsidiaries operating at a loss.

Seeing weakening demand from the United States, it had huge appraisal losses and a tax write-down in the period from January through March, which caused it to post a quarterly net loss of yen57.6 billion, compared with a yen44 billion profit a year earlier.

The company, one of the largest makers of…

Original post by Top Tech News