Tokyo Steel Manufacturing Cut Profit Target

Tokyo Steel Manufacturing announced on Tuesday the firm cut business result target for fiscal 2007 at the ended of March 2008 by 2.5 billion yen to 245.5 billion yen for the sales, by 6 billion yen to 15.5 billion yen for operating profit, by 6 billion yen to 17 billion yen for recurring profit and by 3 billion yen to 10 billion yen for net profit. The firm expects the selling price of steel products would increase by a large margin while average shipping price would increase slightly. Moreover, the firm forecasts ferrous scrap purchase price in January-March 2008 would increase more than unexpectedly.The firm’s achievement increased to 178.1 billion yen by 14.3% in April-December 2007 corresponding to the same period of last year while decreased to 15.3 billion yen by 48.4%, to 16.7 billion yen by 46.4% and to 9.8 billion yen by 47.7%. The firm could purchase ferrous scrap at target price. However, sub material or fuel prices increased markedly. Return on sales decreased to 9.4% by 10.6 percentage points in April-December 2007 corresponding to the same period of last year. Steel products sales volume increased to 2.37 million tonnes by 1.6%. Export volume increased to 484,000 tonnes by 75.4%. Selling price of steel products increased to 75,000 yen per tonne by 12.4% or 8300 yen. Export price increased to 76,500 yen per tonne by 18.25 or 11,800 yen.The firm increased amount of capital investment of Tawara iron works which is being constructed to 140 billion yen by 20 billion yen than originally intended when machine equipment price is expected to rise than originally intended and the firm builds up the competition power of the works.The firm decided to acquire its own 8 million shares at max 7.5 billion yen.