The Bloomberg Article is Interesting.
For some reason reading thru threads here and elsewhere I thought pentax camera division had turned profitable for Hoya, yet it seems Pentax Cameras and Lenses is Hoya's only division that lost money.
This is a very good article, a very good read:
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Oct. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Hoya Corp., the Japanese lens maker that bought Pentax Corp. for about $1 billion, is prepared to make a similar-sized acquisition to expand its health-care unit.
“We will do some M&As,” Chief Operating Officer Hiroshi Hamada said in an interview at the company’s Tokyo headquarters on Oct. 23. Hoya may target assets as large as Pentax or pursue smaller overseas venture-capital firms, he said.
An acquisition of a health-care business would help President Hiroshi Suzuki expand the company’s most-profitable division, and build on a strategy that led to the 2007 purchase of endoscope maker Pentax. Hoya is also seeking to partner a consumer-electronics company such as Samsung Electronics Co. to compete with larger rivals in the camera market, Hamada said.
“Hoya is a little weak in basic technologies, so it makes sense they’d consider buying a business in order to save development time,” said Mitsuhiro Osawa, an analyst at Ichiyoshi Research Institute Inc. in Tokyo, adding that an acquisition could also help expand distribution channels for medical equipment. “How many doctors do they have connections with? You can’t just build a network overnight.”
Hoya, Japan’s largest maker of optical glass, fell 1 percent to close at 1,975 yen in Tokyo trading, compared with a 1.5 percent decline by the benchmark Nikkei 225 Stock Average. The company’s shares have risen 28 percent this year.
Hamada, 50, formerly president of Dell Inc.’s Japan unit, took over day-to-day operations at Pentax, Japan’s oldest maker of single-lens reflex cameras, in April 2008 and oversaw the closure of the company’s last domestic digital-camera factory.
Partnership For Pentax
The Pentax division will have to build a partnership in order to compete with larger rivals in the digital-camera market, Hamada said. Pentax supplies Samsung with single-lens-reflex cameras for sale under the South Korean company’s brand.
“I don’t know whether we’ll go with Samsung or somebody else, but I can say that we’ll have a deeper relationship with some electronics guys,” Hamada said. “There will be consolidation in the camera business and a small player like us will be like a small boat on a rough sea. But let me be clear: we will not shut down this business.”
Pentax’s sales of 24.6 billion yen ($267 million) in the first quarter were one tenth the 246 billion yen in camera revenue at Canon Inc., the world’s largest maker of the devices. Pentax was the only unprofitable unit among Hoya’s divisions, posting a 941 million yen loss during the quarter ended June 30.
Most Profitable Unit
The health-care division, which makes contact lenses and surgically implanted lenses, accounted for about 14 percent of the company’s overall sales in the first quarter, up from 10 percent a year earlier. The unit’s 21 percent operating margin in the three months ended June 30 was the highest among Hoya’s biggest businesses.
Hoya may post 15 billion yen in operating profit, or sales minus the cost of goods sold and administrative expenses, for the second quarter, a 60 percent increase from the April-to-June period, the Nikkei newspaper said last week, without saying how it got the information. The Pentax unit likely turned profitable for the first time in seven quarters after the company cut costs by reducing the workforce, the Nikkei said.
Hamada declined to comment on the report, citing the company’s media blackout period before the announcement of earnings on Oct. 30. The yen’s 7.4 percent appreciation against the dollar between July 1 and Sept. 30 hasn’t jeopardized the company’s second-quarter net income forecast for 13.5 billion yen, he said.
“We downsized out organization much faster than others, so we were kind of ready to deal with the yen,” he said. “It was unfavorable, but we were ready for it. So our financial results will be about where we planned.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Jason Clenfield in Tokyo at
jclenfield@bloomberg.net; Norihiko Kosaka in Tokyo at
nkosaka1@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: October 27, 2009 03:28 EDT
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