Earnings at the nation's biggest companies may have bottomed out as cost-cutting and improved business conditions helped many bounce back to profitability after taking a beating last quarter, a brokerage said in a recent survey.
The combined pretax profits of 401 companies listed on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange who had released their April-June earnings as of Thursday totaled ¥1.03 trillion on an all-industry basis, compared with the collective ¥2.19 trillion loss posted in January-March, Nikko Cordial Securities Inc. said.
The data show that many major firms posted pretax profits or reduced losses in the first quarter of fiscal 2009. But the sum is more than 70 percent lower than the previous year, before the global financial crisis hit.