Looks like Sharp isn’t going to have an amazing second quarter (that’s the quarter that goes from April to June), as Nikkei is reporting that they will be posting a $282 million operating loss for that three-month period. Sharp is expected to post a loss of 35 billion yen, compared to a profit of 4.6 billion yen a year ago. That’s a pretty steep drop for the Japanese maker, year-over-year. Sales for the quarter are also expected to fall about 3.2% or about 600 billion yen.
These numbers a bit a worse than what analysts were expecting. Analysts were expecting a loss of 21 billion yen, on sales of 612 billion yen. Sharp has been struggling to sell their displays to partners recently, and it definitely shows in these Q2 numbers. A couple months ago, the company secured a 1.9 billion yen bailout. This was after Sharp had a few less-than stellar quarters, thus fell deeply into the red. Something no company wants to see, or have to do.
Sharp is still targeting an operating profit of 10 billion yen for the April-September time frame. Which means that Sharp sales would have to significantly improve from July through September – also known as Q3 – after posting a 35 billion yen loss for the first half of that time frame. That would be about a 45 billion yen turnaround in just three quarters, for Sharp.
In the previous months, Sharp has had trouble in its home market of Japan, thanks to JDI. And it appears that the company is now struggling a lot more than anticipated. Sharp makes displays that are used by many smartphone manufacturers, as well as PC manufacturers and they also have their own line of TV’s using their displays, obviously. Xiaomi is a big customer for Sharp, and they’ve recently been using more from JDI than Sharp. That’s had a pretty big impact on the company in the recent months.
It’ll be a big turnaround for Sharp if they can still make that target of 10 billion yen operating profit for the April-September time frame. Perhaps not impossible, however. The falling prices of their crystal displays are definitely not helping them though.