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Published on: 8/5/2008
Last Visited: 8/6/2008
"Bleak conditions were expected, but the tide has turned more fiercely than we envisaged," said Takaki Nakanishi, auto analyst at J.P. Morgan Securities Japan.
He lowered his first-quarter profit forecast to $3.6 billion, a 44 percent drop from the prior year.He also cut his full-year operating profit forecast to below the $16 billion level predicted by Toyota.
"The final figure may be even a notch below this, depending on how the company opts to book North American restructuring costs and how far used-car prices fall," Nakanishi wrote in a report.
He estimates that Toyota will incur around $480 million in residual value losses because of the dropping trade-in value of large vehicles, in particular.He expects Toyota to take more than half that loss in its first-quarter results.