Toshiba takes $2.3 bln hit from Westinghouse write-down

Troubled conglomerate Toshiba announced Tuesday it had booked a $2.3 billion write-down of its US nuclear unit Westinghouse but said the sale of its medical devices business would reduce its forecast net loss for the year ended March.

A once proud pillar of corporate Japan, the company has been besieged by problems, most notably a profit-padding scandal in which bosses for years systematically pushed their subordinates to cover-up weak financial figures.

Toshiba is now expecting a net loss of 470 billion yen ($4.23 billion) for the last financial year.

However, this is much lower than the previous estimate of a 710 billion yen loss, it announced in a statement.

The company has been shedding businesses in a bid to reboot and last month announced it sold its medical devices unit to camera and office equipment maker Canon for 665.5 billion yen.

Toshiba said it booked a write-down of 260 billion yen at Westinghouse after a rise in financing costs, but that revenue from the sale to Canon outweighed that negative impact.

As a result, Toshiba said that its operating loss will expand to 690 billion yen against the previous estimate of 430 billion yen loss.

The conglomerate said sales would shrink to 5.5 trillion yen from its previous estimate of 6.2 trillion yen because of the sale of the medical devices unit as well as a household appliances unit.