Japan's Sharp swung to a quarterly loss, battered by steep price falls of flat panel TVs and a soaring yen, and the electronics maker warned it would post its first ever annual operating loss.
Sharp, which competes with Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Sony Corp in LCD TVs, reported an October-December operating loss of 15.86 billion yen ($174.6 million) against a 51.99 billion yen profit a year earlier.
Top managers at Sharp, which has been hit by the strong yen, will also take pay cuts and not collect bonuses.
"We have decided not to renew 1,500 contract workers in Japan," Tetsuo Onishi, the company's director for accounting, said.
"By doing so, we shall build a human resource structure that meets the size of sales."
Sharp is vulnerable to eroding prices of both LCD display panels and flat TVs as it sells display panels to other flat TV makers as well as assembling them in its own TV sets.
It slashed its outlook and warned of an operating loss of 30 billion yen for the year to March against its previous forecast of a 130 billion yen profit.
It reported a 183.69 billion yen profit a year ago.
Shares in Sharp lost 44 percent in October-December against a 31 percent fall in the Tokyo market's electrical machinery index.
Reuters