Mitsubishi Motors on Monday halved its full-year profit forecast due to the impact of selling a Dutch factory, but the Japanese automaker said its latest quarterly earnings surged.
The nation’s sixth-biggest automaker by sales said it now expected to earn a net profit of 13 billion yen ($166 million) in the fiscal year through March 2013, down from an earlier forecast of 25 billion yen.
Mitsubishi said the change was “due to the effect of an impending sale of all holdings in Netherlands Car BV”.
Mitsubishi said earlier this month it would book a one-time loss from the sale of its sole European plant to a Dutch industrial group for one euro in a deal that calls on the buyer to keep 1,500 jobs at the facility.
Earlier this year, the Japanese firm announced plans to end production at the factory by the end of 2012, blaming a difficult operating environment in the debt-hit continent.
On Monday, the automaker said it posted a net profit of 20 billion yen in the April-June quarter, from a net profit of 4.3 billion yen in the same period last year.
The gain was partly due to a one-time gain from Mitsubishi’s sale of its holdings in a Chinese automaker, it said.
Sales in the quarter were down 2.9 percent at 419.3 billion yen, said the maker of the i-MiEV, the world’s first commercially produced electric car.
