Toshiba has again postponed an overdue earnings report for the October-December quarter. The Japanese company said it needed more time to look into a possible accounting fraud at its US nuclear unit.Toshiba on Tuesday delayed the release of its quarterly earnings report again, sending its shares diving more than 8 percent by the midday break.
Japanese media said the company would take another month to publish the overdue report, fanning fears the stock could be delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
“If you look at today’s fall in the stock price, market players are already pricing in a delisting,” SMBC Friend Securities market strategist Mari Iwashita said in a statement.
Corporate crisis
While it did not release earnings in February as originally scheduled, Toshiba warned back then it was on track to report a huge net loss in the fiscal year to March as it faced a hefty write-down at its US atomic subsidiary, Westinghouse Electric.
Toshiba shares have lost more than half of their value since late December when the company first warned of multi-billion-dollar losses over Westinghouse.
The fresh crisis comes less than two years after the firm was hammered by a huge profit-padding scandal.
It was found that top executives had pressured employees to cover up weak results for years after the 2008 global financial crisis.
hg/did (AFP, dpa)
