Nissan April-June net profit jumps 14% to $821 mn

Japanese car giant Nissan today said net profit rose 14% in April-June as sales in North America soared while a weaker yen boosted its bottom line.

But the country's second biggest automaker also warned that sales to China, the world's biggest car market, tumbled while demand in recession-riddled Europe was also weak.

For the three months to June, Nissan said it earned 82 billion yen ($821 million), up from 72 billion yen in the same quarter a year earlier.

Sales came in at 2.51 trillion yen, Nissan said, compared with 1.89 trillion won in the same period last year.

It added that owing to an accounting change in its reported results with the Tokyo Stock Exchange, sales amounted to at 2.23 trillion yen.

The automaker, part-owned by France's Renault, left unchanged its forecast of a 420 billion yen net profit for the fiscal year to March 2014.

Like rivals Toyota and Honda, which report their results next week, Nissan has benefited from a sharply weaker yen, which makes them more competitive overseas and inflates the value of repatriated foreign income.

Nissan said sales to the US market soared 20 percent to 306,000 vehicles in April-June as it gets set for a string of new product launches including its Rogue sport utility vehicle and luxury Infiniti brand's Q50 sedan.

It also resurrected its budget Datsun brand this month to woo a new generation of cost-conscious buyers in emerging markets.

Nissan, which in 1981 killed off the brand that was a favourite of legions of Western drivers, has launched a 'next-generation' of the car to penetrate high-growth developing economies, including India.

Despite the upbeat quarterly results, Nissan saw a 3.3 percent year-on-year decline in unit sales to 1.17 million vehicles, as sales in China tumbled about 15%.

'Market conditions were challenging in the first quarter, but our results were in line with our prior expectations,' Nissan Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn said.

'We anticipate robust contributions from our new product launches in the second quarter and beyond. Nissan is on track to deliver its full-year guidance.'

The firm has not fully recovered from the impact of a consumer boycott of Japan-brand goods in China, which came as a long-running diplomatic spat between Tokyo and Beijing over a chain of East China Sea islands flared anew last year.

Japanese firms saw sales in the world's biggest vehicle market plunge and many closed factories for a time as urban riots swept across China.