Japanese electronics group Toshiba posted a 38 percent rise in quarterly operating profit on Monday, thanks to sales of its flash memory chips and thermal power plants, and it raised its full-year outlook closer to market estimates. The world's No. 2 maker of NAND flash memory chips after South Korea's Samsung Electronics has so far benefited from solid demand and prices for flash memory and its system chips, used by clients such as Apple and Nokia in their digital music players and cell phones. Toshiba expects its NAND prices to fall 20 percent in October-December from end-September for an annualized 40 percent price fall, in line with its previous estimate for a 50 percent decline, Executive Vice President Fumio Muraoka told reporters.
The conglomerate lifted its full-year outlook, forecasting an operating profit of $2.54 billion. Ahead of the results, 15 analysts polled by Reuters had been expecting Toshiba, which also competes with General Electric in nuclear reactors, to make a full-year operating profit of $2.64 billion. But Toshiba's liquid crystal display business deepened losses made in April-June as prices of mobile phone displays plunged. Its Regza-brand flat TVs were also hit by price competition in Europe and the United States, Muraoka said. Toshiba said it earned an operating profit of $537.2 million in July-September, helped by sales at its newly acquired U.S. nuclear power unit Westinghouse and sales of thermal power and medical systems. Toshiba, which has been trimming its operations to focus on its core semiconductor and nuclear power businesses, plans to build a new plant by 2009 to build NAND chips, used for data storage in portable gadgets. It also plans to buy microchip production lines from Sony to expand its lineup of logic chips.
