Hitachi’s Profit Plummets 30%

Hitachi Ltd., Japan’s biggest electronics company, said Thursday that its earnings plummeted more than 30% in its 1991-1992 fiscal year because of price wars in chips and computers.

Hitachi predicted that profit will continue to slide this year.

It reported pretax profit of $2.9 billion in the year ending in March, down 33% from a year earlier, while sales were flat at $60.2 billion.

“There was a lot of price competition in computers in America and Europe, and at home the financial community has been doing badly,” a Hitachi spokesman said.

Hitachi, which depends on mainframes and large systems for much of its business, has been harder hit than other companies by cutbacks in computer investment by Japanese financial institutions. These have been hurt during the past year by a succession of scandals and the Tokyo stock market slump.

Hardest hit was its consumer electronics division, which lost $116.3 million, as penny-pinching consumers opted not to buy new audio and visual equipment.

The downturn in business activity has forced Hitachi in recent months to reorganize its staff. The company shifted workers from semiconductor and consumer units to its heavy electrical division--the only sector where profit did not drop.

That unit was buoyed by increased government spending and high investment by electric power companies.

In the current fiscal year, Hitachi forecast a fall in 1992-1993 pretax profit to $2.4 billion.