Singapore 23/03/2016 - Japan’s Mitsui & Co is expecting a loss of 70 billion yen ($623 million) for its fiscal year ended March 2016 due to impairment losses in its assets including those for copper, the company said Wednesday.
The Japanese firm had forecasted in February a profit of a 190 billion yen profit for the current fiscal year.
It had made a 306 billion yen profit in its last fiscal year ended March 2015.
It expects impairments of 260 billion yen of which the largest write-down of 115 billion yen is from its copper projects in Chile including its investment in Chile’s Anglo American Sur and the Caserones copper project also in Chile.
Other write-downs come from its coal, energy and machinery businesses.
The impairment losses are caused by a revision in “long-term price outlooks in light of recent trends in minerals and energy markets and their supply and demand,” it said.
Like other global metal mining and trading firms, Japanese trading houses have had to write off millions of dollars of metal assets due to the global slump in commodity prices.
In February, Sumitomo Corp also booked an impairment loss of 111.6 billion yen in the nine-month period ended December 31, 2015 which includes a 77 billion yen write-off against the Ambatovy nickel project.