The Japanese automaker posted its first loss since 1957 as it took a multibillion-dollar hit from scaling back its electric-vehicle plans.
Honda Motor on Thursday reported its first annual loss since becoming a publicly traded company in Japan seven decades ago, as the costly retreat from its ambitious electric-vehicle targets plunged earnings into the red.
The automaker reported a net loss of $2.7 billion for the fiscal year that ended March 31. Earnings were weighed down by more than $9 billion in restructuring charges and write-downs after a retrenchment of its E.V. strategy. It is the first loss that the 77-year-old company has reported since listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1957.
The sharp downturn underscores the extent to which Honda — and many other automakers that poured billions into electric vehicles — has been buffeted by cooling demand.
“The business environment and customer demand have changed beyond our expectations,” Toshihiro Mibe, Honda’s chief executive, said in a news conference in Tokyo on Thursday. “We were not able to respond flexibly enough.”
Just five years ago, Honda was racing to catch up to Tesla and Chinese rivals such as BYD in building electric cars. It pledged to make its entire lineup electric or hydrogen-powered by 2040, a more aggressive transition than rival Japanese automakers likeToyota, which remained cautious about fully electric cars and continued to throw its weight behind hybrid and gasoline-powered models.
For some, Honda’s rapid pivot to electric vehicles was unexpected for a company long known for its mastery of the internal combustion engine. Still one of Japan’s top-selling automakers behind Toyota, Honda first made inroads in the United States in the 1970s with a fleet of low-cost vehicles powered by some of the world’s most efficient engines.
