Japanese computer maker Fujitsu said Thursday its net profit dropped 73.4 percent in the quarter to June due to a lack of special gains that had inflated its earnings a year earlier.
Net profit for the fiscal first quarter came to 664 million yen (5.7 million dollars), down from 2.50 billion yen a year earlier.
Current profit, however, rose to 6.34 billion yen from 478 million yen as sales increased 7.5 percent to 1.10 trillion yen.
Fujitsu said the net profit fall was mainly due to the absence of extraordinary gains worth 15.9 billion yen a year earlier after it reached an out-of-court settlement in a lawsuit filed in the United States.
Despite the year-on-year net profit slide, Fujitsu chief financial officer Masamichi Ogura said the first quarter outcome "is still beyond our initial projections.
"IT investment continued to be solid outside Japan while capital investment finally started to move forward," Ogura said.
As a result, Fujitsu said it now expects to post net profit of some five billion yen in the first half to September, compared with its previous estimates of breakeven.
While raising its first half projections, Fujitsu left unchanged its full year to March 2007 forecasts, with net profit seen at 80 billion yen and revenue at 5.2 trillion yen.
The company usually makes its most profit in the second half of the fiscal year and Ogura said Fujitsu needed to see how sales perform towards the end of 2006 before making any upgrades to the full-year forecasts.
