Mitsubishi Motors likely to post 100 billion yen loss

Japanese car maker Mitsubishi Motors Corp is likely to post a group operating loss of around 100 billion yen ($949.3 million) this year on poor sales of new cars in North America, a newspaper said on Saturday.
Mitsubishi's profitability was hit by stiff price competition in North America, where the Big Three US car makers and others had cut prices, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said.
The likely 100 billion yen group operating loss for the year ending March 31 would be worse than the firm's projection for a loss of 45 billion yen, the newspaper said. The car maker posted a profit of 82.76 billion yen a year earlier, it added.
Officials at Mitsubishi Motors, 37 percent owned by DaimlerChrysler, could not immediately be reached for comment.
Nihon Keizai said Mitsubishi Motors was seeing a recovery in Europe, where its profit was being pushed up by the strong euro. Another plus was that sales had been growing in Asia outside Japan, the newspaper said.