Write-Offs Reduce Fluor’s Annual Profit to $6 Million; Stock Declines : The company takes a $129-million charge in relation to planned sale of money-losing subsidiary, new accounting methods.

Fluor Corp., after announcing plans to sell a money-losing lead operation and to adopt new accounting procedures, Thursday reported a profit of $6 million for its latest fiscal year.

Though the Irvine-based engineering and construction giant warned earlier this week that the onetime “housecleaning” charges would mean substantially lower net earnings for the year, the results surprised investors, who sent the company’s stock down $2 a share to close at $42.75 in Thursday’s trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

The company’s annual profit, equal to 7 cents a share, contrasted with earnings of $164.2 million, or $2.01 a share, for the previous 12 months. Annual revenue remained at $6.6 billion.

“They wrote off everything except the kitchen sink,” said John Simon, an analyst with the brokerage Seidler Amdec in Los Angeles. “They went through everything, saw what doesn’t look good and said, ‘Well, we might as well write it down now.’ ”

Fluor charged $129 million against its annual earnings, including $96 million related to its plan to divest Doe Run Co., a lead producer based in St. Louis. The company also adopted new accounting practices recently established by the federal Financial Accounting Standards Board, and that trimmed an additional $33 million from earnings.

With the charges behind the company, “we are now in a position to fully focus on our strategic vision of delivering consistent high earnings growth,” Fluor Chairman Les McCraw said in a statement.

McCraw said he was “encouraged” by profit growth in the company’s core operations. Fluor Daniel, its engineering and construction business, posted a record pretax profit of $191 million, up 15% from $161 million the year before. And A.T. Massey, Fluor’s low-sulfur coal business, posted a pretax profit of $80 million, 32% higher than last year.

For its fourth quarter, which ended Oct. 31, Fluor reported a loss of $59.3 million, or 73 cents a share, including the write-down from the lead operations. That contrasted with a profit of $46.8 million for the same period a year earlier. Quarterly revenue rose 13% to $1.8 billion from $1.6 billion.

“Long term, the outlook is very positive,” said Hugh Holman, senior analyst at the brokerage Alex. Brown & Sons in Baltimore. The stock price decline, he said, “is a reaction to the latest events. . . . Things are moving in the right direction, but the disagreement (on Wall Street) is how fast they are moving in the right direction.”