Olympus Corp. records heavy losses for fiscal 2014/15

Olympus Corp. noted a loss of 8.73 billion yen for the fiscal year that ended in March 2015. The company incurred expenses worth 53.9 billion yen.The sales of the imaging business declined by 12.9% to 83825 billion yen and posted a loss of to 13.870 billion yen. The company made an investment to develop B2B operations. It further cited reasons such as shrinking market for compact digital cameras and a weaker yen for production overseas. In Q4, it could not fulfill the target sales units for mirrorless cameras. In the entire year, a decline by 52% to 19.6 billion yen was noted for compact models,16% for mirrorless models and14.8 billion yen for other items. The total sales of digital cameras within Japan went down by 14% to 22.3 billion yen. In the markets outside Japan, it declined by 19% to 47 billion yen. The company expects increased sales and profit for the current fiscal year to March 2016. This has been attributed to the favourable performance of the medical business. An increase by 5.9% to 810 billion yen has been estimated and profit in operation will rise by 9.9% to 100 billion yen. A net profit of 56 billion yen has been estimated.