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Earnings Roundup
Nintendo sales slip, forecast slides

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The company said yesterday it earned $325.4 million in the April-December period while sales were $4.146 billion. Nintendo did not report earnings for the third quarter alone and has not previously reported nine-month earnings figures. It offered no comparison to a year ago.

The Kyoto-based maker of Super Mario and Pokémon games said it now expects net profit of $509.4 million on sales of $4.81 billion through the year ending March 31.

It previously had predicted $566 million in profit and $5.18 billion in sales for the period.

Spokesman Yasuhiro Minagawa said slow sales in Japan and a supply shortage during the U.S. holiday-shopping period put the full-year sales targets for the game machines beyond reach.

Minagawa also said the yen's surge against the dollar had depressed earnings.

Nintendo, whose U.S. headquarters is in Redmond, had hoped to sell 6 million GameCube consoles and 20 million Game Boy Advance handheld machines worldwide this fiscal year.

By the end of the April-December period, GameCube global sales totaled 4.39 million consoles, while Game Boy Advance sales were at 15.61 million units.

Nintendo is up against fierce competition from Sony's PlayStation 2 and Microsoft's Xbox. PlayStation 2 remains the leader.

Record year for Exxon Mobil

DALLAS — Exxon Mobil saw fourth-quarter profit jump 63 percent as it benefited from higher crude-oil and natural-gas prices.

The world's largest publicly traded oil company said yesterday it also set a one-year profit record, $21.51 billion, nearly double its profit for 2002.

In the October-December quarter, Exxon Mobil earned $6.65 billion, or $1.01 a share, compared with $4.09 billion, or 60 cents a share, a year earlier.

Excluding $2.23 billion from an IRS settlement and other one-time gains and losses, Exxon Mobil earned operating profit of $4.42 billion, or 68 cents a share, compared with $3.79 billion, or 56 cents a share a year ago. That easily beat the 58 cents-a-share forecast of analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call.

Sales rose to $65.95 billion from $56.21 billion.

Shares of Exxon Mobil, one of the 30 Dow industrials, rose 66 cents to $41.47 yesterday.

Analysts said they had expected a strong fourth quarter but that results were even better than expected partly because Exxon Mobil's chemicals business, long in the doldrums, posted a $400 million increase in profit.

Honeywell recoups from loss

TRENTON, N.J. — Honeywell International turned a modest fourth-quarter profit on slightly higher sales, rebounding from a huge loss due to nearly $3 billion in one-time charges a year earlier.

The maker of aerospace products, advanced materials and automotive products reported profit yesterday of $407 million, or 47 cents a share, matching the consensus forecast of analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call.

In 2002's fourth quarter, the company posted a net loss of $1.47 million, or $1.78 a share, mainly due to $2.83 billion in charges for asbestos litigation, restructuring and write-downs for falling value of assets.

Sales totaled $6.19 billion, up from $5.86 billion a year earlier. That was fueled mainly by favorable currency-exchange rates, which added 4 percentage points to revenues, and higher sales in the transportation and specialty-materials businesses.

For all of 2003, the company posted profit of $1.32 billion, or $1.54 a share. In 2002, the company had a net loss of $220 million, or 27 cents a share. Sales for the year rose 3.7 percent, to $23.1 billion from $22.3 billion.

Honeywell, a Dow stock, saw its shares rise 27 cents to $35.95.

Bristol-Myers forecast lags

PRINCETON, N.J. — Bristol-Myers Squibb, the largest U.S. maker of AIDS medications, forecast 2004 profit below analyst estimates after sales of new drugs helped it post a 15 percent gain in fourth-quarter profit.

The company released estimates for the full year for the first time, forecasting $1.50 to $1.55 a share in profit, excluding some costs. That fell below analysts' per-share estimate of $1.62 in a Thomson Financial survey.

Cheaper generics drugs are taking sales from the company's one-time top sellers such as Glucophage for diabetes. New York- based Bristol-Myers expects to lose as much as $1.3 billion in revenue this year to generic-drug manufacturers, Chief Executive Peter Dolan told analysts.

"They still have big, big patent expirations after this year," said Susan Cross, an analyst at Wilmington Trust, which owns Bristol-Myers stock. "It really is a transition year."

Shares of Bristol-Myers, which trailed Pfizer, Merck and Johnson & Johnson by global 2002 drug sales, fell 75 cents to $28.82 yesterday.

Compiled from The Associated Press and Bloomberg News.

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