Canon No Smiles For The Camera – US-FOREX.US
Japan’s high-tech exporters keep reporting bad news, even as data has begun showing the recession could end soon.
Today’s dismal report came from Canon
, one of the giants of the country’s consumer-electronics industry.
Canon’s woes stem from the familiar litany of recession-induced ills: a strong yen has made Japanese goods expensive in other parts of the world, while demand at home remains anemic as terrified Japanese curtail their personal spending and corporate customers slash budgets.
So while Canon’s profits came in better than the previous quarter, they remained abysmally low for the second quarter that ended in June.
For the quarter, Canon reported an operating profit of 471 million, up from 210 million in the first quarter. That’s a far cry from last year’s quarterly operating profit of 1.7 billion, revealing how deeply the recession has hurt the company.
Canon sells more digital cameras than any other firm, and it has benefited from the massive shift from film cameras to digital models. Amateur and professional photographers alike have flocked to the company’s top-end products, which can run as high as 8,000 for a digital single-lens reflex camera, not counting the thousand-dollar lenses that must be added on.
But the company also sells electronics equipment to businesses: copiers, fax machines, printers – precisely the kind of gear that executives have stopped buying as cash has dried up.
Earnings tallies like this one have led some analysts to say the economy has turned a corner because they are an improvement from the previous quarter. But until customers begin spending again, a shallow recession is still a recession for companies like Canon.
Thomson Reuters contributed reporting to this article.