CORRECTED - CORRECTED-UPDATE 4-Hitachi losses grow, hope on hard drive turna
(Cuts reference in paragraph 10 of May 13 item to Western Digital, whose forecast range did not miss consensus estimates)
TOKYO, May 13 (Reuters) - Japan's Hitachi Ltd (6501.T) tumbled to a quarterly loss on slow TV sales and a tax writedown but said on Tuesday it would rebound to a profit this year on a recovery in hard drives, pushing its shares up 6 percent.
Japan's biggest industrial electronics company aims to outrun a stronger yen and price falls this year by focusing resources on high-capacity hard drives and cost cuts, as demand for its power systems plateaus.
For the financial year to next March, Hitachi expects a net profit of 40 billion yen ($386 million). That would compare with a net loss of 58.13 billion yen the previous year, but misses the mean estimate of a 64.5 billion yen profit from 10 analysts surveyed by Reuters.
For a graphic on Hitachi's results, click: here
On an operating basis, Hitachi said it expects profit to rise 10 percent to 380 billion yen this year.
After the announcement, shares of Hitachi held earlier gains and closed up 5.9 percent at 719 yen, against a 2.1 percent rise in Tokyo's electric machinery subindex .IELEC.T.
"A 10 percent rise -- if they can achieve this, it's not bad at all. There was some talk that they'd be much more conservative," said Tomomi Yamashita, a fund manager at Shinkin Asset Management Co.
FINGERS CROSSED
Hitachi, the world's No.3 maker of hard disk drives after Seagate Technology STX.N and Western Digital Corp (WDC.N), posted its second straight quarterly profit on hard drives in January-March.
Hard drive makers have been helped by booming demand for PC storage, but that is seen unlikely to last.
Steeper-than-expected price cuts caused the quarterly outlook at Seagate to miss estimates.
"We were able to put products onto market in a timely way, while prices are still strong for cutting-edge products," Hitachi Senior Vice President Toyoaki Nakamura told a news conference. "We hope to stay somehow in the black in April-June as well."
Hitachi swallowed massive appraisal losses and a tax writedown in January-March in a bid to spring back to profit, causing it to fall to a quarterly net loss of 57.6 billion yen, compared with a 44 billion yen profit a year earlier.
But the firm, whose many subsidiaries have sparked interest among bankers and investors searching for a deal in Japan, said losses would continue in its digital media segment, weighed down by its flat TV operations. Continued...
