Nissan Motor Co. announced Thursday that it will report 75.961 billion yen in unrealized losses on its stockholdings in its earnings results for the first half of fiscal 1998.Nissan, which has been hurt recently by poor business performance, has been aggressively trying to sell assets, including its headquarters building in Tokyo, as part of a restructuring plan. However the huge evaluation losses will offset gains from the asset sales.Nissan's announcement came one day after companies closed their books for the first half of the 1998 business year. The 225-issue Nikkei average on the Tokyo Stock Exchange is now down by more than 3,000 points since the end of March, when most Japanese companies closed their books for the 1997 business year. "We have been severely affected by the continuing declines of bank shares since last November," said a Nissan spokesman.Of the 75.96 billion yen in losses, Nissan said that nearly 60 billion yen resulted from the plunge of bank stocks.The nation's second-largest automaker also said that 20.2 billion yen in losses were due to plunging Fuji Bank shares and 15.8 billion yen in losses were incurred by the Industrial Bank of Japan's falling share prices.On the same day, Nissan also announced that it will report appraisal gains of 17.606 billion yen on some of its stockholdings, offsetting part of the 75 billion yen in losses. The firm said it would announce revisions of its earnings projection for the April-September period in the near future.
