Finance

Home page

Finance

Japanâ€™s Aiful Corp. to axe 2,000 jobs

24 September 2009 09:57 (UTC +04:00)

Baku - APA-Economics. Japanese consumer finance firm Aiful Corp. said Thursday that it would cut 2,000 jobs, or almost half of its regular workforce, as it braces to slide into the red this year.
Kyoto-based Aiful, one of Japan’s biggest consumer finance companies, also said that it would apply to reschedule its debt repayment to creditors.
The company expects a net loss of 311 billion yen (3.4 billion dollars) in the year to March 2010, much worse than an earlier projection for a profit of 8.1 billion yen. Last year it logged net earnings of 4.3 billion yen.
Aiful said the job cuts would save 12 billion yen a year in labour costs while it will need to pay one-off special allowances of 8.9 billion yen for the early retirement program.
Aiful shares plunged 21 yen, or 15.7 percent, to 113 yen on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Thursday afternoon.
The group slipped into difficulty due to the burden of repaying interest to borrowers following a 2006 supreme court ruling that capped the maximum interest rates lenders can charge, it said.
Fund-raising has become more difficult since the collapse a year ago of Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers and the subsequent financial crisis, it said. Source: AFP.