Sharp Corp. announced Thursday its group net loss for the business year to March is expected to reach a record ¥450 billion due to shrinking demand for its main products.

The forecast is worse than the ¥376.08 billion group net loss Sharp logged last year and the projection it made in August for a ¥250 billion net loss this year.

"We should have taken much speedier steps to reduce the business risk when the business environment quickly changed," President Takashi Okuda told a news conference in Tokyo.